Public Evening Lecture by Professor Dr. Alexander Ziem (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Department of German Studies)
On social media, too, a vast amount of information rains down on us at an incredible speed and without ceasing. To avoid being overwhelmed by this sheer flood of data, we are forced to sort and categorize the information we perceive. Despite the significant cognitive demands involved, this process takes place almost automatically and unnoticed. It is guided not least by frames that we have acquired and that steer the process of understanding below the threshold of perception. This lecture will argue that frames, in their function as templates for understanding, are intrinsically social in two respects: They arise from social interaction and simultaneously shape it, which is why they always operate as tools for interest-driven control and selective distribution of information (aka “framing”).
Professor Dr. Alexander Ziem holds the Chair of “German Linguistics” at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and is the director of the FrameNet German Constructicon (https://framenet-constructicon.hhu.de/) and the primary initiator of the “Digital Cultures” degree program. After teaching and conducting research at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Basel, he served as a fellow at the “International Computer Science Institute” (FrameNet) in Berkeley, California (USA), in 2013 and 2014, and led various DFG projects. From 2011 to 2019, he served as director of the Graduate College associated with SFB 991 “The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science.” As a visiting professor, he first taught at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy in 2019, and then at Kyoto and Tokyo Universities in Japan in 2025. His current work focuses on the further development of the German FrameNet and Constructions, incorporating a Global FrameNet perspective (the latter supported by the DAAD in cooperation with Prof. T. Torrent and Prof. O. Czulo). His research focuses on construction grammar (including its overlap with phraseology), frame semantics, and digital linguistics in combination with the study of public language use.
Moderator: Professor Dr. Konstanze Marx-Wischnowski
