Doctoral Researcher Laura Gärtner

Laura Gärtner earned her B.A. in Applied Languages from Paris-Sorbonne University in 2018. After working for two years as a recruiting coordinator at a listed company in the Paris Region, she enrolled at Heidelberg University to complete a Master’s in Transcultural Studies. Literature and Language Contact in the Francophone Area with a specialization in French linguistics in 2022. Her Master’s thesis examined the representation of the Jew in French Telegram groups within a conspirationalist milieu. Laura’s main academic interests are computer-mediated communication, semantics, discourse analysis and the intersection between construction grammar and discourse. Prior to becoming a PhD candidate, she was adjunct lecturer at the seminar for Romance Languages in Heidelberg and student assistant at the chair for French, Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics. In her dissertation, Laura will be investigating the staging of enemies from a linguistic angle. She will thus carry out her doctoral project by detecting language structures that transmit enemy representations in an array of media sources from 21st-century Identitarian movements in France. By adopting a two-fold approach that includes French discourse analysis and construction grammar, Laura will explore syntactic structures in a large-scale, multi-media corpus. Her data set comprises of music, literature, essays, social media, and websites produced by self-declared Identitarian groups and individuals. By combining statistical corpus linguistic techniques with a qualitative analysis, she aims to show that cognitive representation units are expressed through recurrent language patterns that can be detected in discourse.