The research group aims to investigate, from a contrastive perspective and over a period of several years, a segment of the discourse initiated in Italy and Germany around the implementation of renewable energies. The two initial corpora, composed ad-hoc, are based on the online public communication of influential actors, ideally accessible to the entire society but also addressed to specific audiences, aimed at channelling public opinion and creating a climate of acceptance for the senders’ positions. These corpora are compared with up-to-date versions of the relevant websites in order to identify developments in the semantisation of linguistic media as well as other semiotic codes used. These hypertexts are analysed with tools from dynamic approaches to text linguistics and quantitative-qualitative discourse investigation.

One line of research focuses on the role of vocabulary, both general and special, in discursive development. The related terminological analysis is supported by Dr. PhD  Federico Collaoni, research fellow at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici in Rome. A second line of research investigates the specific contribution of individual linguistic media and other semiotic codes as well as their synergies to the generation of new knowledge. Another line of research detects the most characteristic text types for both linguistic-cultural areas involved and contrastively elaborates the respective peculiarities in text organisation and linguistic choices. In close association with this, a further line of research investigates the pragmatic significance that certain grammatical and textual structures may assume. To this end, the selections made and their function in organising and developing the discourse are probed in relation to the text types present.  The relevance of the forms for individual linguistic and social actions aimed at positioning the broadcaster in the public discourse and influencing its development, attracting consensus, informing, raising awareness and mobilising public opinion or specific target groups is then analysed. A final line of research examines the most suitable forms for disseminating the results of the analyses to the different target groups, both experts and lay users, respecting the different levels of specialisation (e.g. discourse dictionary vs. terminological glossary vs. popular glossary).

Selected Publications:

Pubblicazioni scelte:

Jammernegg, Iris (2022), “Diskurs steuernde Textsorten in Deutschland und Italien: eine kontrastive Analyse im Rahmen des Energiewendediskurses”, in Laura Auteri, Natascia Barrale, Arianna Di Bella, Sabine Hoffmann (Hrsg.), Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive. Akten des XIV. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG) (Bd. 6). Bern: Peter Lang, [Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Beihefte], 115-124.

Jammernegg, Iris/ Kuri, Sonja/ Collaoni, Federico (2022), „Diskursive Implementation der Energiewende in Deutschland: eine linguistische Analyse zu Diskursorganisation und Wissensaufbau anhand von drei Akteuren des deutschen Energiesektors“, in Karoline Irschara, Claudia  Posch e Gerhard Rampl (Hg.), Wort – Satz - Korpus: Multimethodische digitale Forschung in der Linguistik, Innsbruck: innsbruck university press, 17-46.

Jammernegg, Iris (2020), “Rationale und emotionale Synergien in deutschen Energiewende-Diskursstrategien: Das Beispiel RWE”, in Gabriella Carobbio, Cécile  Desoutter, Aurora Fragonara (eds.), Macht, Ratio und Emotion: Diskurse im digitalen Zeitalter / Pouvoir, raison et émotion: les discours à l'ère du numérique. Bern: Peter Lang [Linguistic Insights 275], 143-161.

(2020) “Quantitativ-qualitative Exploration von Diskursmerkmalen und crosslingualen Aspekten“, in Riccardo Roni (a cura di), Mantua Humanistic Studies. Volume XII, collana Mantua Humanistic Studies, Mantova: Universitas Studiorum,  229-257. Open access: http://hdl.handle.net/11390/1192219