Prof. Dr. Karin Birkner

University of Bayreuth
Germanic Linguistics

Affiliated Fellow (FRIAS School of Language & Literature)
March 2010
March 2012 – September 2012

Last Update: 31.08.2012

Curriculum Vitae

As a young scholar at the Free University of Berlin, my major field of interest was second language acquisition. From 1988 till 1991 I worked as a student assistant on a project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), exploring second language acquisition in learner varieties of Polish migrant labourers. After completing my Magister in German Language and Hispanistics in 1991, I continued to work on this project, focussing on grammaticalization processes. In 1993 I joined the project “Promotion of Gender Competences of Boys and Girls in Educational Institutions” at the University of Bielefeld, analysing teacher-pupil interaction in videotaped school lessons and developing instructive material and interactive strategies for teachers in order to guaranty equal treatment. From 1994 until 1999 I was involved with the DFG-project “Impression Management of East and West Germans in Job Interviews”, supervised by Prof. Peter Auer at the University of Hamburg. My dissertation deals with an analysis of communicative genres and the intercultural self-presentation strategies of East and West German job applicants. From 1999 until 2008 I worked at the University of Freiburg, inter alia from 2006-2008 on a project sponsored by the DFG. The study explored patients’ subjective illness theories about the origin of psychosomatic and chronic pain diseases and focussed on verbal communication techniques and negotiation processes in doctor/patient interaction. During this period, I finished my Habilitation – an investigation of relative clauses in spoken German using a construction grammar approach. Since April 2008, I have been working as a full professor of German linguistics at the University of Bayreuth. My research areas are interactional linguistics, grammar and prosody in interaction, construction grammar, intercultural and institutional communication, medical communication, and second language acquisition.

Selected Publications

Birkner, Karin (2008) Relativ(satz)konstruktionen im gesprochenen Deutsch: Syntaktische, prosodische, semantische und pragmatische Aspekte, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.
Birkner, Karin (2001) Ost- und Westdeutsche im Bewerbungsgespräch. Eine kommunikative Gattung in Zeiten gesellschaftlichen Wandels, Niemeyer, Tübingen.
Birkner, Karin/Stukenbrock, Anja (2009) (ed) Die Arbeit mit Transkripten in Fortbildung, Lehre und Forschung, Verlag für Gesprächsforschung, Mannheim http://www.verlag-gespraechsforschung.de/2009/birkner.htm
Birkner, Karin (2009) Noch vor dem Erstkontakt: Selbstdarstellung von Frauen und Männern in online-Partnerbörsen, in: Gerd Ulrich Bauer (Hrsg.), Sichtwechsel. Festschrift für Bernd Müller-Jacquier, iudicium, München, 161 – 176.
Birkner, Karin/Kern, Friederike (2008) Impression Management in ‘Intercultural’ German Job Interviews in: Spencer-Oatey, Helen (Hrsg.), Culturally Speaking. Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, 2., überarbeitete Auflage, Continuum, London, 241 – 257.

FRIAS Project

“Action” in Conversation Analysis.

Action is a central issue in interactional linguistics, its definitions being as varied as interaction theories. Although it is a central concept in conversation analysis, it remains to be defined thoroughly. Schegloff (2007) names the following examples of actions: “asking, answering, disagreeing, offering, contesting, requesting, teasing, finessing, complying, performing, noticing, announcing, promising, […] inviting, announcing, telling, complaining, agreeing, and so forth“ (Schegloff 2007:7). During my fellowship at FRIAS I will be studying the concept of “action” and its coherences as it is used in a conversation analytic framework. (The results will be integrated into teaching material on conversation analysis.) The project tries to clarify “action” and different concepts in its orbit, and asks the following questions:

How does a concept like narrative relate to action?
What is the relationship between action and practice?
What is the difference between action and action type?
How does action projection work?
How can recipients recognize which kind of action is being performed?
What is the link between action and sequentiality?
What impact does it have on an action if it is part of an extended sequence?