How to represent spoken language in written form: Analysing conversational data from James Joyce to Southern Papua New Guinea

Professor Gast will deal with the variation of human language along two dimensions, the medium (spoken vs. written)and the level of distance or proximity between the interlocutors (from local to global). The main focus of the talk will be on matters of methodology, i.e. the question of how the type of register variation in question can be systematically investigated and, ideally, measured.