The research group ’International studies’ consists of two individual pillars with partly coinciding participants, namely ‘Constitutions in context’ (Forfatninger i kontekst) and ‘TYPOlex’.

Constitutions in a context

The research project ‘Constitutions in a context – political, legal, historical, cultural, linguistic, social aspects’ is an interdisciplinary project that combines the views of humanistic- and social studies in the study of the European constitutions as historical and contemporary documents. This interdisciplinary approach provides an opportunity not only to look at constitutions as legal documents, but also as documents that express certain historical circumstances as well as cultural, linguistic and social realities and ideals. In principle, the project covers all the European constitutions which mainly are dealt with in a thematically comparative manner, i.e. not country by country, but rather as transversal themes such as ‘Division of power’, ‘Rupture with the past’, ‘Basic rights’, ‘Freedom of citizens vs. the state’s unity’, ‘Adjusting to new realities’ etc. Evidently, one of the most important perspectives is the efforts to draw up a European constitution within the EU, efforts that both elucidate and are elucidated by the existing individual European constitutions.

The project is carried out through a series of monthly meetings with individual presentations, as well as more comprehensive events and publications. The first presentation was held on 31 October, 2007, on the occasion of CBS’ 90th anniversary: ‘Constitutions in context’, a panel discussion and presentation dealing with the theme: ‘The European Constitution and the European constitutions and their political and historical contexts’. A joint publication taking its point of departure in the panel discussion is currently in the pipeline.

TYPOlex

The relation between language, cognition, and culture has been recognised for a long time, but it has seldom been systematically studied and rarely to a greater extent. The TYPOlex project examines the differences in ways of thinking and perceptions of reality as they are expressed through political, economical, cultural and legal contexts. Thus, the disclosed differences have far-reaching communicative- and social consequences.

As the name TYPOlex indicates, the project takes its point of departure in the study of such lexical differences of a systematic and structural character that can be typologised between the (western)-European languages. As far as the structure of their lexicon is concerned, the Germanic and Romance languages can be divided into two types, namely: endocentric- and exocentric languages (please see the attached list of publications for more information on this subject). These differences, deeply rooted in the languages’ lexicalisation patterns, have several syntactic and textual consequences manifested in the fact that not only the words are structured differently in the two types, but also the fact that, as a consequence of this, sentences and texts are constructed on the basis of different principles as well. Taking this perspective further, it is these differences that determine cognition, ways of thinking, and perceptions of reality.