Research

It has been a standard assumption in linguistic theory, based on Frege’s principle of compositionality (cf. Frege 1884, 1892), that the meaning of a sentence is composed on the basis of the meaning of its parts and the way these parts are structured. However, it is not really clear that there exists a transparent, bi-directional mapping between (morphosyntactic) form and (semantic/pragmatic) meaning. Many phenomena challenge the existence of such a mapping. Such challenges either exist in the form of morphosyntactic elements that do not seem to provide a semantic/pragmatic contribution, or in the form of meaning parts that lack a morphosyntactic realization. Hence, either the mapping between form and meaning (in its broadest sense) in natural language is less transparent than one might think, or morphosyntactic and/or semantic/pragmatic structures may be richer than they appear. This RTG seeks to investigate and understand what this mapping exactly amounts to.

To this end, the RTG will examine a wide range of case studies involving potential challenges for this mapping. The case studies cover a wide range of languages, and the specific questions of the projects cover all core areas of linguistics: grammatical theory (morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics), linguistic variation including sign languages, language change, language processing and language acquisition.

PhD Projects in the first cohort

• Verbal agreement in and across sign languages

PhD student: Gautam Ottur

Supervisors: Markus Steinbach, Hedde Zeijlstra

• From discourse to syntax

PhD student: Andrea Matticchio

Supervisors: Marco Coniglio, Stavros Skopeteas

• Word-form and word-meaning mismatches in language acquisition

PhD student: Judith Kalinowski

Supervisors: Nivedita Mani, Thomas Weskott

• Form-meaning mismatches in number and gender

PhD student: Feras Saeed

Supervisors: Hedde Zeijlstra, Sascha Alexeyenko, Caroline Sporleder

• Diachrony of split NP / DP constructions

PhD student: Lieke Hendriks

Supervisors: Marco Coniglio, Goetz Keydana

• Scrambling and scalar implicatures

PhD student: Maik Thalmann

Supervisors: Clemens Steiner-Mayr, Thomas Weskott

• Imperatives and imperative speech acts across modalities

PhD student: Marianthi Koraka

Supervisors: Nivedita Mani, Markus Steinbach

• Null objects

PhD student: Prudence de Pontbriand

Supervisors: Goetz Keydana, Guido Mensching

• Wh-less degree questions

PhD student: Karen Hovind

Supervisors: Uwe Junghanns, Stavros Skopeteas

• Particles with question and disjunction uses

PhD student: Zhao Zeqi

Supervisors: Uwe Junghanns, Clemens Steiner-Mayr

• Presentational particles

PhD student: Katja Friedewald

Supervisors: Anke Holler, Guido Mensching

• Identifying context-dependent meaning components of figurative expressions

PhD student: Irene Pagliai

Supervisors: Anke Holler, Caroline Sporleder