The creation of this group arose from the desire to consolidate and institutionalise a space for its members to collaborate in the contrastive study of German and the Ibero-Romance languages. It began to take shape as a result of the international conference "German dictionaries: new perspectives" held at the Universitat de València, which brought together some of its members.
That first activity was followed by five more conferences (2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020), held both in Germany and Spain, which have brought together new specialists in this field who, from different perspectives and methodological proposals, have participated in the discussion of phenomena of common interest and have enriched the debate initiated by the original members of the group. Besides the works arising from the individual research of its members, the collaboration has so far resulted in the publication between 2015 and 2021 of 6 collective volumes and 1 thematic dossier for an international journal, coordinated by members of the group and with the participation of other members. The award of a grant within the call for grants for consolidatable research groups of the Regional Department in Education, Culture and Sport of the Generalitat Valenciana (Valencian Government), gave this group the opportunity to constitute itself as a research structure with specific goals. Seeking its full consolidation among the groups of Spanish German-Hispanic studies and, in particular, a greater projection in the international sphere.
The team is made up of 13 researchers from 9 different German, Portuguese and Spanish universities. The common denominator for all of them is their mastery of German and Spanish, although some of them have also devoted themselves scientifically to the study of other languages, such as Portuguese, Catalan, Italian and French. Although all the members have philological training, their lines of research have followed very different paths. The aim of the research group was to combine different perspectives and methodological proposals in order to identify and analyse the phenomena related to the object of study more adequately and in a more global approach.
In this way, the group aims to reach results and conclusions of relevance for fields as diverse as descriptive linguistics, discourse analysis, language contrast, discourse genres and traditions, L1 and L2 teaching for specific purposes or didactic lexicography, among others. Of the 13 members of the group, 10 are Germanists working in Spanish universities and 1 in Portugal. Of the 2 members of the team linked to German universities, 1 is a professor in Romance linguistics (Anja Neuss-Hennemann) and 1 in German language didactics (Kathrin Siebold).
It should be noted that several of the researchers have already collaborated in previous projects under their leadership, such as "InCrit. Incidentes críticos en la comunicación transcultural alemán/español/catalán", directed by Marta Fernández-Villanueva (2016-2018, FFI2015-70864-P), "La organización de la información en los discursos orales en su variación genérica: estudio contrastivo alemán vs. Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan" (2019-2020, AICO/2019/123), led by Ferran Robles, and "Systematizität und Variabilität: Konvergenzen und Divergenzen in diskursiven und pragmatischen Erwerbssequenzen der Lernersprachen Deutsch, Französisch, Spanisch und Italienisch bei erwachsenen Fremdsprachenlernern verschiedener Ausgangssprachen" (in force since 2015), led by Kathrin Siebold.
The concept of “language variation” is key for the study of the evolution of languages and of social, professional and educational communicative systems. Social, cultural, health, economic, technological and educational transformations are developed, conveyed and reflected through their linguistic and communicative manifestations. The aim of the group is to study the progress that current society is undergoing through the analysis of the essential linguistic variables that are involved and interact in human communication. These variables depend on the profiles of speakers (e.g. idiolectal, dialectal variation, according to gender, age, social status, level of education, etc.) and on the uses they make of language according to the interpersonal identities they adopt (i.e. register variation), the codes they use to communicate (i.e. variation of mode), the different textual platforms they use (i.e. variation of discursive genre) and the different persuasive strategies with which they convey their intention and image (i.e. stylistic variation). The analysis of these variables requires approaching the study of communication at different scales, from its macro and hyper discursive aspect (e.g. interrelation between the variables that interact in business or academic communication, or the complexity of multimodal communication of social media and digital platforms) and also of its micro discursive components (e.g. variation of phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic units). As highlighted by experts in language variation (Bayley, 2013; Chambers and Schilling, 2018), in order to address comprehensive and innovative studies in this field, it is necessary to keep up to date the methodology needed to define and classify the categories, criteria and parameters essential to understand and analyse these variables and their interrelation.
Some of these have been extensively studied (e.g. dialectal variation) and others are currently being studied (e.g. variation of discursive genre), but there are still many ambiguous and controversial aspects of other relevant variables, such as those involved in communicative register variation. This type of interpersonal and contextual variation covers the whole spectrum of human interaction, from that which takes place in the most sophisticated and conventional contexts to that which takes place in the most intimate and familiar settings. There are different degrees of dependence and interrelation between various registers in the same communicative act, which has posed a difficult challenge for experts, particularly when it comes to accessing real data and compiling large and representative corpora. Moreover, throughout history, its study has been approached from many different perspectives, including heterogeneous, ambiguous and confusing variables that have generated controversy within this field of research. This theoretical heterogeneity and methodological complexity have hindered the development of in-depth and wide-ranging studies on this language variety, which could effectively transfer their results to society and the labour market, offering practical methods and tools for understanding, learning and mastering it. There are other variables in a similar situation (e.g. idiolectal variation, stylistic variation, genolects, chronolects, etc.).
With the aim of contributing to the advancement of this field, the main objectives of the SILVAGroup are the following:
- To delve into the fundamental categories, criteria and parameters for the study and analysis of language variation, and the factors involved in its current behaviour in the English language and other majority languages, such as Spanish and German.
- To investigate language variation from a comprehensive pragmatic approach, highlighting its interpersonal and multimodal dimensions in its fluctuation throughout everyday communication from public to private settings.
- To work from emerging technologies, corpus linguistics and other multidisciplinary fields of human communication, contrasting advances and results between languages.
- To design methodologies for the study of language variation, useful in the search and detection of distinctive features that shed light on definition and typology of its parameters of analysis, and also practical for learning and mastering them, especially at a social and professional level.
- To participate in platforms and projects for the dissemination of research, especially in international conferences and impact publications, in order to encourage further study of RV and to publicise the results of the group’s activity.
- To constitute a national and international support platform for research in this field and for its dissemination.
The group’s research activity will be structured from the IULMA, based at the Universitat de València, to which most of the members of the group belong, and is made up of a multidisciplinary team of both young and experienced researchers from the UV, UPV and UA.
All the members of the group share the essential research lines for the study of RV: language variation, corpus linguistics and contrastive linguistics. The group also has experts in other relevant research lines. This multidisciplinary nature provides this team with the advantage of approaching language variation from different but complementary areas of knowledge and research lines, allowing an innovative depth and perspective and results that can really bring a significant advance in the field.
