The advancement award predominantly distinguishes research work produced by young academics from all subject disciplines, which arose from German-Polish collaboration or represents an important contribution towards the field of German-Polish relations. The advancement award can also be awarded as a recognition of efforts to intensify the cooperation with Polish institutions at the University of Greifswald and at institutions directly linked to the university.
With her thesis on ‘The Functions of Funktionsverbgefügen in Text - a Corpora-Based, Quantitative-Qualitative Investigation Demonstrated in German and Polish Wikipedia Articles’, published in 2020 by Narr Francke Attempto, Dr. Susanne Kabatnik produced a contrastive investigation of German and Polish Wikipedia articles, which is situated at the interface between German-Polish grammar, text linguistics, foreign language didactics and cultural studies. In her thesis, Dr. Kabatnik examines which textual functions are performed by the German and Polish Funktionsverbgefügen in the Wikipedia articles. Results showed, for example, that some German Funktionsverbgefüge had Polish equivalents. The language systems form certain verb-noun constructions similarly and also display convergences in their functions of lexical cohesion, i.e. for enriching, compressing, emphasising, reintroducing, and changing the vantage point of information in the text.
The critical analysis of textbooks on German as a Foreign Language is a further focal point of the thesis. Here, Dr. Susanne Kabatnik placed emphasis on rating style and the need for revising inadequacies. The thesis is thus a contribution in the field of text production and reception in German-Polish foreign language acquisition. It is relevant to both German and Polish linguistics and is an empirically-based study in the field of German-Polish contrastive grammar.
The doctoral thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Konstanze Marx and Prof. Dr. Janusz Taborek (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań). As a result of intensive exchange activities and joint visits to conferences – initiated by Dr. Susanne Kabatnik – a close research collaboration has evolved between the German Linguistics section of the Department of German Philology at the University of Greifswald and the Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań. This will be consolidated continuously by planned bilateral periods of research in Poznań and Greifswald, as well as joint publication projects.
Contact at the University of Greifswald
Dr. Marek Fialek
Department of Slavonic Studies
Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz 3, 17489 Greifswald
Tel.: +49 3834 420 3213
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