Next to the popular-culture industry of Hollywood, BBC and Netflix TV series, English-language pop music, comics, cartoons, books and plays, as well as celebrities, gaming and cyber culture have become a staple part of many people's daily cultural diet across the globe. If this content is so prevelant in our lives, it is no wonder that it also influences the way we speak. However, due to its association with ephemeral "low culture" status, until recently, the language of pop culture has been neglected as an object of empirical linguistic inquiry. This module will explore both how language is used and how it is represented in the language of pop culture by drawing on several sub-fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, critical linguistics, corpus-based approaches, stylistics, pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and applied linguistics, and concepts from related fields of sociology, cultural and media studies. We will analyse the ways in which text producers echo or exploit cultural understandings, stereotypes, or norms in meaning-making in written, spoken, and multi-modal texts. We will touch on the question how language and linguistics are represented in pop culture narratives, from real-world languages, constructed languages, and (mis)understandings about what sort of work a linguist does. Finally, we will discuss how and why the language of pop culture could be incorporated in the foreign language classroom.
- Dozent/in: Morana Lukac