Daniel Rellstab

Daniel Rellstab is a senior assistant at the German Department and teaches German linguistics, especially pragmatics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics. His research interests center on the pragmatics and sociolinguistics of human communication: he has explored the theoretical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of the pragmatics of communication in his book on Ch. S. Peirce’s theory of natural language, he has scrutinized the impact of gender on language use, he has analyzed hybridizations of gender in hip-hop-communities and elsewhere, and he has described and explained communicative practices in multilingual virtual networks. He has formulated preliminary thoughts about the relationship between intercultural communication as taught and analyzed in linguistics, and postcolonial theory, which has been foreign to linguistic intercultural communication research until now. In his latest research project, he investigates communicative competencies and practices of heritage speakers as learners of German as a foreign language in the French speaking part of Switzerland.

Selected publications

• „Remaining Foreign: Contesting Discourses of Difference in a Multilingual, Multiethnic Virtual Network",in: J. Normann Jørgensen (ed.) 2010: Love Ya Hate Ya. The sociolinguistic study of youth language and youth identities. Cambridge: CSP, 55-97.
• "Staging Gender Online – Gender Plays in Swiss Internet Relay Chats", in: Discourse & Society 18/6: 765-787.
• Charles Sanders Peirce’ Theorie natürlicher Sprache und ihre Relevanz für die Linguistik. Logik, Semantik, Pragmatik. Tübingen: Narr (2007).
• „Rüpple statt Schwüpple – Genderplay im #hiphop“, in: Christa Dürscheid/Jürgen Spitzmüller (eds.) 2006: Perspektiven der Jugendsprachforschung/Trends and Developments in Youth Language Research. Frankfurt/M. u. a.: Lang, 201-226. (= Sprache - Kommunikation - Kultur).
• „Interkulturelle Kommunikationsforschung – postkolonial?“, in: Hess-Lüttich, Ernest W.B. (ed). (2006): Eco-Semiotics. Umwelt- und Entwicklungskommunikation. Tübingen: Francke, 345-365.
• „Postcolonialism & interkulturelle Kommunikation – Gemeinsamkeiten und Differenzen“, in: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 15 (2003).