Prof. Dr. Natalia Filatkina

Profile

Academic positionFull Professor
Research fieldsGerman Language (Linguistics),General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
KeywordsLinguistik, Formelhaftigkeit, Sprachwandel, Korpusbasiertheit, Computerphilologie

Current contact address

CountryGermany
CityHamburg
InstitutionUniversität Hamburg
InstituteInstitut für Germanistik

Host during sponsorship

Prof. Dr. Claudine MoulinFachbereich Germanistik, Universität Trier, Trier
Start of initial sponsorship01/11/2006

Programme(s)

2006Sofja Kovalevskaja Award Programme

Nominator's project description

From tally stick to data base What did the German expression, einen blauen Mantel umhängen, mean in the Middle Ages? What is a tally stick, what has it got to do with committing a criminal offence and how does it come about that this term is still used in the same context in modern German? These are the questions being answered by Natalia Filatkina who is investigating the history of such formulaic figures of speech in German. These so-called phraseologisms are, after all, a salient feature of all languages and essential for understanding them. What are the social, historical and cultural phenomena underlying these ancient phraseologisms? What conclusions can be drawn for modern language? So far, there have only been fragmentary investigations in this field. In her pioneering work, which is combining historical philology with the international technologies of markup languages, Natalia Filatkina is preparing an electronic body of texts from the 8th to the 17th centuries and interpreting them according to modern linguistic criteria. In this way, a data base is being created that will bring a part of cultural history nearer not only to an interdisciplinary circle of experts but also to a broad non-academic public and will generate new knowledge for the present day.