New funding from the Academy of Finland: the DEMLANG project

We are pleased to announce that the Tampere-Helsinki research consortium Democratization, Mediatization and Language Practices in Britain, 1700–1950 has received four-year funding from the Academy of Finland (560,000 EUR). The team members are Paivi Pahta (PI), Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, Jukka Tyrkkö and Turo Hiltunen. Elena Seoane is proud to be one of the International Partners of the project, together with Anita Auer (Lausanne), Birte Boss (Duisburg-Essen), Erik Smitterberg (Uppsala) and Laura Wright (Cambridge).  

DEMLANG produces knowledge about the interrelatedness of the sociocultural processes of democratization and mediatization, and language practices in Britain, 1700–1950. The aim is to discover mechanisms operating in the bidirectional relationship between sociocultural change and language change. This relationship will be empirically studied in public and Private texts mediating ideologies and values. The contribution of ViEW and is members will focus on 20th century processes of democratization in inner and outer circle varieties of English. Macrolevel analyses with large corpora allow data-driven tracing of changing patterns in lexis, phraseology and syntax and the discovery of statistically significant turning points, while microlevel analyses with philologically well-argued smaller corpora make it possible to uncover the complexity of phenomena and to explain emerging, changing and declining linguistic features with the help of historical background data. The consortium provides the critical mass and complementary areas of expertise required for achieving the theoretically and methodologically challenging aims.