Research Area
The linking of simple units to more complex units is a central feature of human language. The Research Area Syntax and Lexicon deals with the properties of these connections and investigates the nature and complexity of these connections across languages.
Our research is based on formal theories, but also has practical applications, such as in the creation of an extensive database backed by corpus data of clause-embedding predicates in different languages has been created. The investigations on the different possibilities for expressing complex ideas by combining words or sentences will be incorporated into the research on comprehensibility and language mixing.
DFG project
(Aqusha)
The project deals with obligatory control constructions in Aqusha Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian). The central question of this project is: What are the necessary and sufficient syntactic properties that make obligatory control possible?
DFG ANR project
(BooLL)
Research on the impact of language on arithmetic ability and early numerical learning has been growing significantly over the last decades. But when we turn to other areas of mathematical cognition, such as those involving basic logical concepts that can be expressed using everyday language, research on the impact of language is still lacking. The BooLL project seeks to fill this gap and brings novel methodology and evidence to bear on the issue of whether logical abilities are dependent on (native) language.
DFG project
(KoMiRe)
The project examines relative clauses as attributes to 1st or 2nd person personal pronouns. Correct agreement between subject and finite verb in these constructions is rarely found in German real life communication. This project will collect and examine relevant constructions in German, Polish and Italian through experiments. The goal is to gain general insights about agreement patterns.
Elsa-Neumann-Fellowship
(LeXIC)
The project aims to answer the following questions and contribute to our understanding of language mixing and universal grammar: How do the similarities and differences between linguistic properties affect the possibility of language mixing? Specifically, do similarities create potential switching points? What can the switching between different properties tell us?
DFG project
(MeasChange)
This project investigates the interaction between two ways of understanding change by comparing and contrasting for the first time the behavior of Verbs of Change in two major empirical domains: their interaction with diagnostics of event structure and their behavior in various types of measurement constructions.
DFG project
(CRC 1412-Register A08)
The central aim of this subproject in the CRC 1412 „Register: Language-Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" is to explore the general hypothesis that language separation/choice and language mixing function as register markers. It does so by investigating the situation-specific linguistic variation in Saamaka (Tongo), one of the major Maroon languages of Suriname.
DFG project
(CRC 1412-Register A10)
The subproject in the CRC 1412 „Register: Language-Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" investigates the hypothesis that optional morphological doubling is cross-linguistically correlated with a particular situational-functional property of discourse – namely, to what extent a unique Question Under Discussion is retrievable – and thus to register.