News & Updates

Notification of Acceptance: FASL 24 Talk

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I am happy to announce that my abstract ‘Don’t regret anymore! On the semantic change of the clause-embedding predicate żałować ‘regret’ in Polish’ has been accepted for an oral talk presentation at the conference Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 24 (FASL 24) to be held at the New York University in May of 2015. Below you can find comments of three anonymous reviewers:

Reviewer 1: “Interesting paper and very well laid out. Definitely accept. And we can always do with more diachronic syntax at FASL!”

Reviewer 2: “An interesting paper with a diachronic component to it.”

Reviewer 3: “An interesting abstract – presenting a sound analysis in both synchronic and diachronic terms.”

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Teaching: Winter Semester 2015/16

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In the winter semester 2015/16 I will be teaching two extensive courses at the University of Potsdam. Both of them are concerned with grammatical categories in German and its history. On the undergraduate level I will try to explain to what extent language change and language acquisition are related to each other. The course for graduate students, in turn, will focus on adverbial clauses. My main aim is to illustrate what kinds of adverbial clauses exist in Modern German and, in particular, how they developed.

Notification of Acceptance: Journal Article

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I learned today that my new paper “On the loss of copy-raising and the development of infinitive complements. The case of German beginnen ‘begin'” has been accepted for publication in Journal of Historical Linguistics. The paper is expected to appear in March/April of 2015. At this point, I would like to thank four anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments and interesting questions.

Language Consultant: Impersonal Strategies

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Lisa Deringer and Olga Rudolf, colleagues from the University of Jena, working in the project Towards a typology of human impersonal pronouns. Theoretical, comparative and empirical studies (abbreviated as ImProType and led by Volker Gast) asked me to fill a questionnaire and translate various impersonal structures into Polish. They build up a database with approx. 60 languages and Polish is intended to be included in the database as one of the languages. I’m glad I can help and use the database as well 😀

New Collaboration: Modal Particles and Covert Modality

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Last week I gave a lecture at the University of Vienna where I met my colleague Werner Abraham. Werner delivered a very interesting talk about modal particles in German and their sensitivity to verum focus. I commented extensively on his talk and we decided to write a joint paper on a similar topic from a contrastive point of view. On the picture to the left Werner is chairing the workshop on Covert Patterns of Modality at the University of La Rioja (Spain), that he organized together with Elisabeth Leiss. The main aim of our paper is to examine the modal particle denn in German (e.g. in Wer hat dich denn angerufen?), its distribution at the syntax-semantics interface as well as its realization in languages having no modal particles. Mainly, we show that although some languages have no modal particles, it is still possible to express the modality encoded by German denn. In this connection we talk about covert patterns of modality. Stay tuned for more information!