Luisa Schwestka M.A.

In 2025, I obtained my master’s degree in German and French at JGU Mainz. During my studies, I developed a great interest in linguistics and wrote my master’s thesis on the number agreement of the plural country names Niederlande ‘the Netherlands’ and USA. In an empirical study, I examined variations like Die Niederlande hat/haben zugestimmt ‘The Netherlands has/have agreed’ in language production and reception based on corpora and acceptability ratings. After my graduation, I initially worked as a research assistant and completed an internship at the editorial dictionary department of the Duden publishing house. Besides onomastics, my research interests include lexical change and word formation change.

At the CRC “Human Differentiation”, I am pursuing my PhD as a part of the project “Zur Versprachlichung von Kindheit und Behinderung“ ‘On the Linguistic Negotiation of Childhood and Disability’ and I am in charge of the study concerning childhood. In my doctoral project, I research the linguistic differentiation between children and adults as well as the linguistic asymmetrizations established between these two groups. Children have always been considered as incomplete and deficient human beings expected to become „fully human“. They do not have agency, are not recognized as full persons yet and are generally subordinated and dependent on adults. Hence, children have yet to be formed into fully competent members of society.

I will examine the following questions:

• To what extent are children considered “non-persons” that are pushed to the margins of what counts as human despite their ontological status as human beings?
• Which concepts of childhood can be found in historical sources such as books on etiquette, encyclopaedias and dictionaries and how do these concepts change over time?
• Which boundary zones of humanness are children assigned to, in order to distinguish them from prototypical adults?
• Which qualities are ascribed or denied to children in comparison to adults and how do they manifest in (potentially evaluative) language?

With corpus-linguistic and cultural approaches, I will examine the asymmetrical differentiation between children and adults in lexis, word formation and onomastics.