Katja Friedewald

RTG PhD student, member since 2021

Project "Presentational Particles in Romance Languages. A diachronic syntactic study of French and Italian"

Presentational particles (like fr. voilà/voici or it. ecco) have in common that they introduce utterances which are strongly deictically bound to the discourse context and which follow the communicative goal to direct the addressee’s attention to a denoted entity. Those utterances therefore can convey statements, mirativity and directive force at the same time, which situates presentative sentences somewhere between declarative, imperative, and exclamative clause types. Crosslinguistically, we can observe that despite their various etymological origins, presentational particles show the tendency to behave verb-like on a syntactic level. Investigating their (morpho-)syntactic development and their respective grammaticalization paths in diachrony can therefore a) explain their particular syntactic behavior in modern language use as well as help us analyze their syntactic features, and b) give insight into a communicational strategy whose emergence seems to follow a universal scheme.

Research interests:

- Presentative constructions in Romance languages and beyond

- Diachronic corpus linguistics

- Diachronic evolution of syntactic structures (with a focus on French and Italian)

- Processes at the syntax-pragmatics interface

Vita:

Since 03/2022 PhD student within the RTG Form-Meaning Mismatches, University of Göttingen

2020 – 2022 State examination for upper secondary level teaching (Referendariat am Gymnasium), Studienseminar Göttingen

2016 – 2020 - M.A. TransRomania Studies (with distinction), University of Göttingen and University of Ferrara (Italy)

- M.Ed. for the subjects French and History, University of Göttingen

- Third Subject Program: teaching certificate for Italian, University of Göttingen

2013 – 2016 B.A. Two Subjects Bachelor in French and History (with distinction), University of Göttingen and Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (France)