Portrait
Daniela Landert is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Basel. She completed her PhD and her Habilitation in English Linguistics at the University of Zurich. In 2020, she became became the Principal Investigator of an SNF PRIMA Grant, based at the University of Basel. In her project "The Pragmatics of Fictional Dialogues in Improvised Performance" she and her team study dialogues in improvised theatre and compare them to dialogues in scripted fiction and in spontaneous conversation. More information on this five-year project can be found on the project website.
Her research interests include characteristics of spontaneous language production, pragmatics of fiction, historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, stance and modality, news discourse and mass media communication. In her habilitation project, "Historical Corpus Pragmatics: Epistemic Stance in Early Modern English", she investigated how speakers and writers in the period from 1500 to 1700 expressed their attitudes concerning the certainty and reliability of the information they present. This includes expressions that are still used today, such as I think, it seems and certainly, alongside expressions that are more period-specific, such as verily and forsooth, as well as expressions that rely on an interpretation in the context in which they are used. The focus of her study was on how different factors of the context in which texts were produced – such as genre and text type, the situational roles of speakers and writers, the identity of speakers and writers – affect the way in which stance is expressed.
In her PhD project, "The Personalisation of Mass Media Communication: British Online News Between Public and Private", she studied five British Online News Sites and analysed the different types of strategies they use in order to present news as something personal. She developed a model that integrates and differentiates between dimensions of the personalisation of news, such as technical aspects of the communicative setting (e.g. the options for readers to comment on news and to interact with journalists), the level of content (e.g. the selection of news topics and the perspective from which they are presented) and linguistic strategies (e.g. the use of direct speech and first and second person pronouns).
Her research has been published in the form of a research monograph and various articles in journals, edited volumes and handbooks. She has presented her work at numerous international conferences and she has participated in the organisation of several such conferences, including the ICEHL-17, the ISLE-3 and the HEL-LEX5.
Before joining the University of Basel, Daniela Landert worked as Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the English Department of the University of Zurich. She studied English Language and Literature, Computational Linguistics, and History at the University of Zurich and at the Humboldt University in Berlin, graduating in 2008. In 2012, she received her PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Zurich. She spent six months as a Research Fellow at Lancaster University, UK and another six months at the Research Unit for the Study of Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG) at the University of Helsinki in Finland. In 2021, she completed her Habilitation in English Linguistics at the University of Zurich.
Publications
Books
Landert, Daniela. 2014. Personalisation in Mass Media Communication. British online news between public and private. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 240). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Jucker, Andreas H., Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler, and Nicole Studer-Joho (eds.). 2013. Meaning in the History of English. Words and Texts in Context. (Studies in Language Companion Series 148). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Landert, Daniela. (in preparation). Methods in Historical Corpus Pragmatics. Epistemic Stance in Early Modern English. (Research monograph).
Articles
Landert, D. (2021) “The spontaneous co-creation of comedy: Humour in improvised theatrical fiction”, Journal of Pragmatics. Elsevier, 173, pp. 68–87. 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.12.007.
Taavitsainen, Irma and Daniela Landert. 2019. “Science”. In: Peter Brown (ed.). A New Companion to Chaucer. Second Edition. Hoboken/Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 379–393.
Landert, Daniela. 2019. “Function-to-form mapping in corpora: Historical corpus pragmatics and the study of stance expressions”. In: Carla Suhr, Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). From Data to Evidence in English Language Research. (Digital Linguistics). Leiden: Brill, 169–190.
Landert, Daniela. 2017. “Participation as user involvement”. In: Christian R. Hoffmann and Wolfram Bublitz (eds.). Pragmatics of Social Media. (Handbooks of Pragmatics, Volume 11). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 31–60.
Landert, Daniela and Gianluca Miscione. 2017. “Narrating the stories of leaked data: The changing role of journalists after Wikileaks and Snowden”. In: Marjut Johansson, Sonja Kleinke and Lotta Lehti (eds.). Discourse, Context & Media 19: 13–21.
Landert, Daniela. 2017. Review of Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl (eds.). Changing Genre Convenstions in Historical English News Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 2015. Anglia 135.2: 358–362.
Landert, Daniela. 2017. “Stance in fiction”. In: Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.). Pragmatics of Fiction. (Handbooks of Pragmatics, Volume 12). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 489-514.
Landert, Daniela. 2017. “Meta-communicative expressions and situational variation of stance marking: I say and I tell (you) in Early Modern English dialogues”. Nordic Journal of English Studies 16.1: 120–144.
Jucker, Andreas H. and Daniela Landert. 2017. “Variation and change: Historical Pragmatics”. In: Anne Barron, Yueguo Gu and Gerard Steen (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. London/New York: Routledge, 79-90.
Landert, Daniela. 2015. “Reportable facts and a personal touch. The functions of direct quotes in online news”. In: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner (eds.) The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then. (Topics in English Linguistics 89). London/New York: De Gruyter, 29-52.
Jucker, Andreas H. and Daniela Landert. 2015. “Historical pragmatics and early speech recordings. Diachronic developments in turn-taking and narrative structure in radio talk shows”. Journal of Pragmatics 79, 22-39.
Landert, Daniela. 2014. “Blurring the boundaries of mass media communication? Interaction and user-generated content on online news sites”. In: Jukka Tyrkkö and Sirpa Leppänen (eds.). Texts and Discourses of New Media (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 15). Helsinki: VARIENG. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/15/landert
Jucker, Andreas H., Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler, and Nicole Studer-Joho. 2013. “Uncovering layers of meaning in the history of the English language”. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler, and Nicole Studer-Joho (eds.) Meaning in the History of English. Words and Texts in Context. (Studies in Language Companion Series 148). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-15.
Landert, Daniela, and Andreas H. Jucker. 2011. “Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries.” Journal of Pragmatics 43.5, 1422-1434.
Landert, Daniela. 2009. “Constructing (non-)normative identities online. Self-classifications in text-based online chats.” Hegemonies in Classification Processes. Special Issue of ISA RC 25 Language & Society Newsletter 6.2, http://www.crisaps.org/newsletter/winter2009/Landert.pdf