Our specialist areas

Grammar theory and language comparison

In grammatical theory, linguists seek to understand the system of human language and to discover what abstract cognitive patterns and structures underlie all languages in the world, so that all people, regardless of their origin at birth, are capable of acquiring any language in the world as their mother tongue. To discover these general patterns of human language, language comparison within a language family and beyond is particularly important.

Language and cognition

In order to understand how the complex system of language is stored and processed in the brain, we research the monolingual or multilingual development of children and adults, the acquisition of written language, the way we produce and understand our mother tongue(s) and foreign language(s), or language disorders (e.g. language development disorders, dyslexia, aphasia). In psycholinguistics, we are therefore interested in the connection between cognition and language and the factors that influence this, such as age, the environment in which someone learns a language, linguistic experiences and other cognitive abilities. Knowledge of this in turn serves as a basis for language therapies, language teaching, language support, etc.

Language and society

As one of the foundations for the social and cultural identity of speakers and their interaction, linguistic action has direct social relevance. Sociolinguistics deals with the social conditionality of language, but also with its socio-cultural implications. Sociolinguists research structural (language change, language mixing, borrowing, dialect equalization, etc.) and socio-pragmatic aspects of language use (language attitudes, language and age, gender, ethnicity, power structures, etc.).

An important topic in sociolinguistics is multilingualism. All people, even monolingual speakers, are fundamentally multilingual and draw on a linguistic repertoire that includes different dialects, sociolects and language styles of one or more languages, whereby the individual varieties are used in a way that is appropriate to the context and situation. Multilingualism always results in contact between the different varieties, which is a factor in the change of languages (language change). However, language contact also gives rise to new language styles or varieties within a language.

Language typology and language description

Language typology is concerned with the characteristics of language and languages - their analysis, comparability, distribution and frequency. In language documentation, the linguistic repertoire of languages that are usually little or not yet described is collected, scientifically processed and analyzed in descriptive, typological, linguistic-historical, literary or sociolinguistic terms. This involves research into the phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic structures of different languages and varieties, as well as the documentation and archiving of language corpora and the creation of databases.

History of science

The history of linguistics is concerned on the one hand with the history of knowledge of grammar and linguistic contexts, with the development of terminology and concepts, but also with the emergence of knowledge about linguistic-cognitive contexts.

The focus of linguistics in Graz is on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the modernism that followed him in 19th century linguistics, above all Hugo Schuchardt. The focus is on the contribution that typologically different languages (Basque, Huastec, etc.) made to the European understanding of language and grammar.