Melanie Seidenglanz

Melanie Seidenglanz studied at Mannheim University and Uppsala Universitet and received her M.A. in German Literature,Philology and Political Science in 2008. She is working on a doctoral thesis in German Philology at Mannheim University titled "Das Verrat-Konzept in den politischen Diskursen der frühen Weimarer Republik."

I use an interdisciplinary (linguistic, history, political science), cultural stud-ies approach. I follow up ideas which describe language changes not only over a longer time period, but also the direct effects of sudden events on the political, social or economic level. As I am interested in linguistic dis-courses, I want to describe the structure of the discourse of treason. Therefore, I will demonstrate how the texts of the built corpora are con-nected to each other. The second goal is to analyse the lexical-semantic fields. Here, I am interested in stereotypes, concepts, frames of mental thinking, collocations and specific lexical fields, associated with the trea-son-discourse. How do people who are directly involved in this discourse, talk about treason or traitors? The third aim is to show the intention of the users. The main question is: Why do they use this specific lexicon? Are they following their interests in a strategic way by insulting others as trai-tor?