Arkiv: Projektmøder

Mads Böttcher
"Facts are real – you don’t dispute them"

Esben Bjerggaard Nielsen
"Toward a Secular Apocalyptic Rhetoric"

How do we talk about apocalypse in a secular frame? The coming of the year 2000 prompted a growing interest in apocalypse in popular culture and in scholarly circles during the latter half of the 20th century. However, within the field of rhetoric attention was almost wholly on religious aspects of apocalypse. The myriad of secular end of the world scenarios was paid little heed.

Fast forward to the end of the first decade of the 21st century, where anthropogenic global warming has substituted the atomic bomb scare of the cold war. We face an environmental crisis of daunting, seemingly apocalyptic proportions, but when trying to engage with some of the clearly apocalyptic rhetoric of politicians, scientists and environmental movements, the rhetorical critic runs into analytical problems, as the current rhetorical theory on apocalyptic contains several blindspots, when it comes to the urgency of environmental disaster discourse.

In this talk I will outline the first steps in my project to develop existing theory of apocalyptic in order to better encompass secular disaster narratives. I intend to go through and discuss two of the most comprehensive rhetorical works on apocalypse, Barry Brummett’s Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric (1992) and Stephen O’Leary’s Arguing the Apocalypse (1994). Some different examples of environmental apocalyptical discourse some of which defy the critical perspectives of Brummett and O’Leary will be shown in order to further engage the existing theory and raise questions about what perspective rhetorical scholars are to take on current secular accounts of the end of the world. I do not expect these questions fully answered in this forum, but I would like any and all feedback on how to best go about further work on them.

Mads Bødker Christiansen
"Mellem direktionalitet og systemstabilisering. Præposition-artikel-enklisen fra oldhøjtysk til nyhøjtysk"

I rammerne af grammatikaliseringsteori gives en introduktion til præposition-artikel-enklisen i tysk, altså det fænomen, at nogle præpositioner og nogle former af artiklen i tysk undertiden optræder som klitika, fx im, am, aufs over for in dem, an dem, auf das. Følgende tre punkter vil blive behandlet:

I) Distributionsregulariteter i moderne tysk.
II) Fænomenets diakroni med hovedvægt på middelhøjtysk og ældre nyhøjtysk.
III) En kort drøftelse af mulige "forklaringer" på den beskrevne udvikling.

Mette Hjortshøj
"Perception and recognition of voices"

My project is about speaker identification, and my presentation falls into two parts. The first is part will be about a voice line-up experiment which explores whether some voices are easier to remember and recognise than others, and whether some listeners are better at recognising voices than others. The results suggest that “common” voices (based on fundamental frequency) are harder to remember and recognise than “rare” voices and that some listeners are better at remembering and recognising voices than other listeners.
In the second part I will show some preliminary results from an experiment designed to explore what it is that people are actually listening for when they judge voices to be similar to or different from other voices. The experiment also investigates whether native speakers of a language and listeners with no prior experience of that language listen for the same or different parameters when judging similarity between speakers.

"Functional Disorders and Communication in Primary Care: The patients who were not there ..."

My project Functional Disorders and Communication in Primary Care investigates the interaction between doctors and patients with functional ("medically unexplained") symptoms using the linguistic/sociological method of Conversation Analysis. It is done in collaboration between Aarhus University Hospital and Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics. The project is funded by the TRYG Foundation.  

My presentation falls in two parts. In part 1 I will briefly introduce the project; i.e. define the subject matter, motivate my research question and choice of method. Also I will touch upon what can be gained by linguistic research into this - traditionally health scientific - field.

Part 2 is the one I would like some feedback on. Here I will give a status update on the (ongoing) process of data collection and the challenges I encountered here. The first issue concerns the selection of consultations to be analysed: Criteria of inclusion are the participating doctors' categorisation of the patients' presenting concerns. Although I have good reasons for choosing this method of selection, it is not without problems. What are the implications of the fact that doctors' categorisations are subjective and often non-transparent for my work?

The second issue concerns the fact that even though I have collected a large amount of consultations, and even though the estimated prevalence of patients with functional symptoms in general practice is about 20%, I have only found two (!) cases of patients categorised by the doctor as presenting "pure" functional symptoms. Does this mean I should continue collecting data infinitely, does it mean I should simply give up....or?

"What’s left to learn about right hemispere damage and pragmatic impairment?"

After two decades of research on pragmatic impairment following right hemisphere damage (RHD), we are left with more questions than answers. There is general agreement that damage to right hemisphere areas can result in impairment of pragmatic function, but there is as yet no consensus about how or why. This may be in part because earlier approaches to the question of pragmatic impairment have been either relatively atheoretic, or have been eclectic in their theoretic approach.

In this talk I approach the problem of pragmatic impairment in RHD from an emergentist perspective. I suggest that viewing pragmatic function as an emergent phenomenon opens up possibilities for new approaches to the problem of pragmatic impairment in RHD.

I will first sketch out what the emergentist approach entails, and then outline three new directions in the area of pragmatic impairment in RHD which I feel are well-suited to an emergentist approach. If time permits, I will also introduce some of my own preliminary results from EEG research on early face and prosody perception. I would be particularly happy to get feedback on the theoretical and conceptual aspects of the presentation.

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