Annika Hübl

Since October 2009, I have been a research assistant for Linguistics at the Department of German Philology in Göttingen. From 2004 to 2009, I studied German philology (focusing on linguistics), communication science, and film studies at the University of Mainz. In Annika Herrmann’s introductory course on the grammar of German Sign Language, I was first exposed to the study of sign languages. Afterwards, I took three DGS-courses, two of them taught by Roland Metz.

Supervised by Prof. Markus Steinbach, I currently write my dissertation on “A new perspective on free indirect discourse – theoretical and empirical evidence from German and German Sign Language (DGS)”. For this, I investigate role shift in DGS on the one hand and free indirect discourse in German on the other hand, thus phenomena from both linguistic modalities (signed and spoken languages). My research concentrates on the linguistic foundations of these non-canonical narrative styles. I motivate my assumptions using elicited and experimental data. Based on this, I want to develop a cross-modal theoretical analysis that is able to deal with these narrative styles.

My research interests lie in the fields of semantics and pragmatics and their interface as well as text and discourse structure. I am particularly interested in investigating theoretical assumptions with empirical and experimental methods and in applying them to the structure of sign languages.