Global South Lecture Series | Silke Jansen & Lucía Romero Gibu (Erlangen) - "Wir" und "Ihr": Sprachwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf den sozialen Raum im Migrationskontext

Silke Jansen & Lucía Romero Gibu | Department of Romance Studies, FAU Erlangen
"Wir" und "Ihr": Sprachwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf den sozialen Raum im Migrationskontext

This lecture will be held in German

"We" and "You": Linguistic perspectives on social space in the context of migration
Silke Jansen, Lucía Romero Gibu

Linguistic interactions possess a spatial dimension insofar as they open up and construct social spaces. Interlocutors thus negotiate social positionings through language. It is in the migration context in particular that questions of power and stereotyping play an important role.

This contribution to the lecture series draws on data from the VIOLIN corpus. It contains narratives pertaining to situations in German institutions that migrants from Hispanic America have experienced as acts of verbal violence.  Using research methods from narrative analysis as well as linguistic pragmatics, we demonstrate how social space is divided through speech acts of separating and distancing into of the “familiar” and “other”. This often occurs through the ascription of stereotypical characteristics that are associated with the “Global South”. As those involved in interaction are excluded from the sphere of the “familiar”, processes of social exclusion take effect, often in the form of violence.