Linguistics

The structure of the (German) language and its use are the focus of my research. In the context of language structure description, I am particularly interested in patterns and means of word formation in the past and present, as well as the classification of word types in German. Beyond the structural level, I deal with various facets of language use, such as the linguistics of lying and the relationship of linguistics to literature and literary studies.

My research focuses on the phonology-morphology interface, in particular the relationship between phonotactics and parts of speech in the dialects of German. I am interested in the derivation of various factors (e.g. inflection, sonority) influencing word type-related phonotactics from a synchronic and partly diachronic perspective. In this context, I find it interesting to be able to derive word types phonologically or phonotactically - in addition to the traditional classification according to morphological and syntactic criteria.

My research focuses on the structure of German grammar, also in contrastive comparison. I am particularly interested in topics such as words and parts of speech, grammatical phenomena in the spoken language and grammatical variation in German. I also find it very interesting to look at German grammar from a contrastive perspective. My current research focuses on grammar acquisition with an emphasis on 'word formation' in German children and in language comparison.

German grammar is my field of research. I am particularly interested in how relational expressions, including prepositions, modal verbs, tense and mode, are used to realize perspectivization at different levels of expression and utterance meaning. I find the polyfunctional potential of these expressions fascinating: Epistemics, deontics, evaluation and volition are the closely linked functional domains that play a major role in this.

My research to date is primarily located in onomastics, the study of names. I am particularly interested in the structural composition of names, especially zoonyms and ergonyms. I also find it interesting how (partly inanimate) objects are assigned a gender and how this is made recognizable in and through the name (morphologically, syntactically, lexically). In this respect, the interplay of genus and sexus seems to be particularly central.

My field of research is the structure of the German language. In particular, I am concerned with fluctuations in the rection of prepositions from both a contemporary and a historical linguistic perspective. I am also interested in punctuation, in particular the syntactic and reader-controlling function of the comma, as well as systematic "errors" in comma placement.