معرفی
Professor Doris Tophinke is affiliated with the University of Paderborn, where she serves in the Faculty of Cultural Studies within the Institute of German Studies and Comparative Literature, specifically in the Department of German and General Linguistics. She maintains her office in room H3.134 at Warburger Str. 100, 33098 Paderborn and serves as the project leader for the Paderborn location of the Dialect Atlas of Central West Germany (DMW).
Professor Tophinke's research spans multiple interconnected areas within linguistics, with a primary focus on literacy and writing practices across historical and contemporary contexts. Her work uniquely bridges contemporary graffiti studies with medieval linguistic research, examining how written forms carry grammatical significance. She investigates 'small forms' of writing like graffiti through the lens of multimodal grammar and cognitive linguistics, while simultaneously documenting language change through her extensive work on Low German dialects and the Dialect Atlas of Central West Germany. Her research demonstrates how seemingly marginal linguistic phenomena provide profound insights into grammatical structures and language evolution.
The patterns in her recent publications reveal consistent engagement with informal language in everyday contexts - from street graffiti to digital communication. Her scholarly output shows increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly with computational linguists on projects analyzing grammatical change. Her work on political graffiti and linguistic expressions demonstrates how language functions as political commentary and social identity marker in public spaces.
- Since 2008: Member of the editorial board of Praxis Deutsch (Friedrich Verlag)
- Since 2008: Member of the editorial board of Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik (de Gruyter)
- December 2011-February 2016: Member of the DFG Subject Committee 'Sprachwissenschaften'
- October 2011-September 2015: Service in DAAD selection committees
- Since March 2019: Member of the review board of 'Niederdeutsches Wort' journal
- Since June 2019: Member of the advisory board for Low German language at the Ministry of Home Affairs of North Rhine-Westphalia
- September 2011-May 2019: Deputy Ombudsperson for Good Scientific Practice at University of Paderborn
- June 2019-March 2022: Ombudsperson for Good Scientific Practice at University of Paderborn
Professor Tophinke actively supervises doctoral students through the DMW project and related research initiatives, providing opportunities for students to work with research data in their theses. She teaches courses including 'Zeichensetzung und (komplexe) Sätze' (Punctuation and Complex Sentences), 'Wörter: Semantik und Funktionen im Wandel' (Words: Semantics and Functional Change), and 'Der Wortschatz der Mode' (Vocabulary of Fashion), integrating her research interests across German teacher training programs and Linguistics degree programs.
She leads the Paderborn team for the Dialect Atlas of Central West Germany (DMW), which involves systematic fieldwork collecting dialect data throughout North Rhine-Westphalia and neighboring states. The project team includes scientific associates, research assistants, and student collaborators who conduct interviews in participants' homes across the survey region, documenting linguistic variations with particular attention to Low German where it is still spoken. The team also works on the Informationssystem Graffiti in Deutschland (INGRID) project, which catalogs and analyzes graffiti as a linguistic phenomenon.
