The research colloquium offers all students, researchers and interested parties the opportunity to exchange views on linguistic topics, their own research work and current projects.
BeLing is open to all researchers in Linguistics in all language departments, from advanced MA students to professors. If you are interested in presenting your research, please send an email with your title to info.csls@unibe.ch by Tuesday 1st of April (no abstract needed). Presentations in languages other than English are welcome!
Information regarding the next event:
Date: 15th of April 2025
Time: 09:45 - 17:00h
Place: Room 220, Mittelstrasse 43
given by: Florian Busch
This talk explores multimodal metapragmatics, extending traditional metapragmatic analysis beyond language to broader communicative ideologies. Beginning with a conceptual overview of metapragmatics—spanning reflexive, reportive, and nomic functions (Silverstein 2021)—I examine how these frameworks apply not only to language but also to other semiotic systems such as gesture, writing, and media choice. The second half of the talk presents a case study on the metapragmatic discourse surrounding Elon Musk’s Nazi salute during the celebration of Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. By analyzing a corpus of 2,000 German social media comments, I demonstrate how different actors engage in metapragmatic framing to construct, debate, and strategically reinterpret the meaning of Musk’s gesture. The findings reveal how far-right discourse employs “metapragmatic gaslighting” (Donzelli 2023)—shifting contextual frames to render even historically highly enregistered gestures like the Nazi salute ambiguous and contestable. This analysis sheds light on contemporary far-right discursive strategies and highlights the importance of a multimodal approach to metapragmatic inquiry.
Donzelli, Aurora (2023): On Metapragmatic Gaslighting: Truth and Trump’s Epistemic Tactics in a Plague Year. Signs & Society 11 (2): 173–200.
Silverstein, Michael (2021): The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 272: 13–45.
