Ferdinand von Mengden
My research has been guided by the assumption that human language is a dynamic, adaptive and interactive phenomenon. This means that language doesn’t exist on its own, but any analysis of human language must consider the communicative and social contexts in which language naturally occurs. Human language must be accounted for by virtue of its being an interactive, inter-individual, social tool rather than a pre-established system which an individual “uses” or “accesses”. As a consequence, I believe that some of the theoretical tenets of the twentieth century are to be overcome. The best linguistic data (in the sense that they will reveal most about how language works) are those elicited from unguided, immediate, unsolicited interactive communication and which are thus embedded (and insolubly linked) with localized every-day practices
This viewpoint entails a certain scepticism towards explanations that solely rest on cognitive or mental assumptions about individuals. Not only the social context, but also the contribution of communicative contexts always need to be taken into consideration when assessing the way in which linguistic utterances are structured – and how these structures emerge. My research projects are based primarily on these tenets.
Currently, my main project is a monograph on Emergent Grammar. While the idea of Emergent Grammar isn’t new, the book project aims at proposing a framework which aligns communicative interaction, social indexicality, social conventions, and other aspects in a way that lends more dynamicity to grammatical and lexical structure. The main claim is that language is inherently variable and context-dependent – i.e., variability and situation-specific conditions are not marginal or exceptional factors that impact language outside so-called “default stages”. Such a fluid view on language and on the linguistic sign doesn’t defy the systematicity of human language, but the notion of ‘system’ must be thought of as a dynamic, open, adaptive and emergent system. Speaking is not ‘using’ a pre-existing toolkit, but the systematicity results from people interacting with each other.
One of the main concepts on which the framework is based id the notion of ‘recontextualization’ which I proposed in
von Mengden & Kuhle 2020. It describes how individual speakers reemploy linguistic material (expressions, constructions) by transferring it from one communicative task to the next. Recontextualization is thus the linguistic equivalent to observations made in cultural evolution ('bricolage') or in non-human behavior (flexible transfer). Recontextualization therefore is a link between language-related cognitive activity and human (or non-human) cognition other interactive phenomena.
Another branch of my research is the
History of Linguistics. A critical stance towards static and/or formalized approaches to language in twentieth-century linguistic theories automatically raises the question of why – in spite of the unanimous agreement in linguistics that human language is subject to change and variation – any theoretical framework in the past at least one hundred years has taken both a single “stage” (rather than fluidity) and an abstracted idea of a ‘system’ (rather than linguistic practices and interactions) as the central point of a respective theory. My research has led to a connection between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalism and the emergence of nation states in Europe one the one hand, western-style codified alphabetical writing practices, as main sources of linguistic essentialism (von Mengden & Schneider 2024).
In the context of my research on
Urban Sociolinguistics a volume appeared in 2019 on the Sociolinguistic Economy of Berlin, co-edited with Britta Schneider and Theresa Heyd. It results from a joint project which started off as a workshop on the same topic held at Freie Universität Berlin in autumn 2016. The focus is on local, small-scale practices in combination with patterns of globalization. How do invisible, domain-specific or localized linguistic practices stand in relation with phenomena such as the use of English as a globally widespread lingua franca? And how do these two levels stand in relation with national standard languages which still form the focus of our view on the way people speak.