New professor in Hildesheim: language research with an eye to the future!

New professor in Hildesheim: language research with an eye to the future!

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Reber has held the professorship for English linguistics at the University of Hildesheim since February 1, 2025. Previously, she worked as a substitute professor at the same university for almost three semesters. Reber has a broad academic foundation, which she acquired at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she studied English linguistics, medieval literature, Nordic philology and intercultural communication until 2002. She received her doctorate in 2008 at the University of Potsdam, with a focus on interaction analysis.

In her research, Reber focuses on affectivity in conversations. She pays particular attention to authentic English telephone conversations and examines how interjections and clicks are used to represent affectivity. She found that conversations have a systematic structure and that their order can be analyzed very precisely.

Academic career and research interests

After completing her doctorate, Reber was an academic councilor at the University of Würzburg from 2011 to 2023. There she led a DFG-funded network on multimodality and embodied interaction from 2012 to 2019. In 2016 she received a DFG research grant that enabled her to stay at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her habilitation thesis dealt with the change in citation styles in the British House of Commons. Reber has also developed a research project on linguistic practices in court hearings, which examines language use in the 20th and 21st centuries as well as geographical differences between English-speaking countries.

An exciting aspect of her research is formal contexts, in which she observes that language is becoming increasingly informal. She pays particular attention to forms of address used by Supreme Court justices in the United States and Australia. She also plans to use AI-supported methods in her research to advance automated speech recognition for transcriptions. In the coming summer semester, Reber will offer a seminar on digital interaction that promotes critical engagement with AI in science.

Language changing

A central theme in linguistics is the constant change in language and vocabulary. The Duden editorial team included around 3,000 new additions in the 28th edition of the Duden from 2020, which contains more than 148,000 keywords. The latest words like “Covid-19” or “gender asterisk” reflect social changes. The usage pattern in everyday language is crucial for the absorption of new terms, which shows how dynamic the language is.

A particularly current topic is gender-sensitive language, which is becoming increasingly important in society and linguistics. Five professors from Bielefeld University have dealt intensively with this topic and are analyzing the role of linguistic categories in perception and gender stereotypes. The use of gender-sensitive phrases such as “The students” or “The students” aims to address all genders, in contrast to the generic masculine.

The discussion about gender-sensitive language also highlights the challenges in practical application, such as the gender asterisk, which is intended to avoid ambiguity. Professors from various disciplines show how important it is to empirically investigate these aspects of language without setting strict rules.

Overall, it appears that language remains a living and dynamic system, shaped by social changes and scientific findings. The research by Elisabeth Reber and others ensures that language change is not only documented but also understood.