‚Mi ricordo′, ‚je me souviens′: ich erinnere mich

Sammlungsübergreifende Interviewanalysen in Oral History und Korpuslinguistik

Abstract

Situated in the interdisciplinary fields of historiography and linguistics, this article evaluates oral history interviews as a resource valuable to both disciplines. The case study analyses the language of remembering in Italian and French life story interviews from the archive Forced Labour 1939-1945 and the LangAge corpus. In five working steps, it implements the oral history approach of developing hypotheses from the data itself with methods from corpus linguistics. Occurrences of personal pronouns we and I are compared and keywords as well as frequent word combinations (n-grams) are identified. These quantitative approaches are complemented by exemplary analyses of frequent phrases such as ‘I remember’ or ‘at a certain moment’. In doing so, the biographical approach of oral history and historical contextual knowledge can be combined with the results of corpus linguistic analysis. Although different transcription standards of oral history and linguistics prove to be problematic, in the future the new research environment Oral-History.Digital will simultaneously support cross-collection and close-to-source analyses of life history interviews.