‘Ich will nach Europa!’: lingua e performance in Perikızı. Ein Traumspiel di E. S. Özdamar

Abstract

Perikızı. Ein Traumspiel is a play, conceived and written by the writer, director and German actress of Turkish origin Emine Sevgi Özdamar to be represented within the international project Odyssee Europe in Germany in the Ruhr area in November 2010. The text is characterized by a performative language (from captions to deictic, from interjections to the use of proper speech elements) and by the presence of nonverbal elements. The main aim of my contribution is to analyse the language of Özdamar in Perikızı. Ein Traumspiel, her latest theatrical text, with particular attention to the vocabulary; besides, in comparison with the lexicon of her narrative texts, to verify to what extent and in what ways the theme of migration is dealt with. At first two corpora have been made (the former containing 2 scenes from Perikızı, the latter two narrative texts). According to a program of concordances, some lexical items have been searched and identified; the resulting data have been compared and analysed to identify the innovative linguistic elements in her work.