Doctoral research fellow  Theresa Klemm

Theresa Klemm received her BA degree in Translation Studies for French and English at Heidelberg University, where she also earned her MA degree in Transcultural Studies. Literature and Language Contact in the Francophone Area with a specialization in French linguistics. Throughout her Master’s program, she worked as a student assistant at the chair of French and Italian Literary Studies at the Department of Romance Studies of Heidelberg University, as well as at the Department of Pragmatics at “Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim”.

In her dissertation, Theresa intends to offer a linguistic perspective on the interdisciplinary and transcultural exploration of ambivalent enemy representations. By means of historical, metalinguistic documents written in French, she analyzes linguistic forms of rejection and degradation referring to language structures, variants or systems judged as diverging from French language norms. In France, metalinguistic evaluations of linguistic norms have been established as normative discourse (discours normatif) since the 17th century. Traditionally, such normative discourses have been spread in the form of commentaries, didactic texts or language chronicles, which is why these genres are especially important to Theresa’s endeavor.

The project comprises a large scale, linguistic discourse analysis which is based on the premise of a common intersection of normative discourse and language purism. This discourse analysis aims at observing how normative discourses reflect and reproduce linguistic purism by rejecting and staging language variants and groups of speakers as enemies. Additionally, increasing ambivalences in explicitly and implicitly expressed unanimous attitudes will be disclosed.

Arguing that situations of language contact bear a high potential for hostile attitudes, Theresa follows a diachronic approach to interlinguistic contact. The influence of contact languages on French will be her special interest. In this context, she focusses on different contact situations in Francophone Canada and Belgium as well as in the region of North Catalonia.