Jason Bishop is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the City University of New York, where he also functions as director of the CUNY prosody laboratory. He is currently one of the most influential researchers on prosodic prominence and the factors influencing its production and perception, documented in many influential papers published in prestigious journals.

Speech prosody is at the center of Jason’s scientific interests but his work covers a wide range of topics and methods. For example, he worked on the role of expectations in the perception of prosody and prosodic disambiguation, on Focus Projection and the meaning of prenuclear accents, on implicit (and explicit) prosody in relative clause attachment, and on individual differences in the production and perception of prosody.

The many interfaces of Jason’s work on prosody with the fields of neuro-psychology, socio-linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, syntax as well as typology make him an ideal contact person for many researchers in the CRC across all areas.

Contact: jbishop(at)gc.cuny.edu

Website

Contact: P.Hendriks(at)rug.nl

Eva Schultze-Berndt is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester (UK). She is a renowned expert in linguistic typology, with an areal specialisation in Australian languages. An important focus of her research is on differential argument marking (DAM), where she investigates factors influencing DAM in spoken language corpora from a cross-linguistic perspective, with special attention to the role of verb semantics, argument structure, information structure and prosody. Cooperation with Eva Schultze-Berndt will therefore be of great benefit to Area B, where DAM continues to be a central topic. But her expertise spans a number of areas of relevance to the CRC, thus making her a valuable asset to the entire CRC: her expertise in prosody and information structure will further strengthen the ties of Area B to Areas A and C; her strong empirical grounding in discourse and ecologically valid data types will support the CRC’s overall focus on discourse; and her cross-linguistic expertise is set to contribute to the CRC’s research on universality and variability. 

Contact: Eva.Schultze-Berndt(at)manchester.ac.uk

Bodo Winter is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and a recipient of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge University Press journal Language & Cognition, a member of the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and AI, and co-founder of the annual Birmingham Statistics for Linguists Summer School. His research focuses on numerical communication, multimodality, gesture, and iconicity. He collaborates with a number of projects within the CRC and provides extensive training in statistics and data analysis in a number of workshops for students, postdocs and PIs.

Website

Kontakt: b.winter(at)bham.ac.uk

Jennifer Cole is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (USA). She is one of the leading researchers in the field of speech prosody and laboratory phonology, and is recognised worldwide, not only as a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology and, until 2015, General Editor of its journal but also by publishing many influential papers in prestigious journals in the fields of Phonetics and Phonology. Her main interests lie in experimental and theoretical research that investigates the physiological and cognitive bases of phonological systems. As the director of the Linguistic Laboratory for Speech Prosody in Urbana-Champaign she supervised several projects that investigated the production and perception of prosody in English and other languages. A major focus of this work is on prosody in spontaneous, conversational speech and methods for prosody annotation, such as the Rapid Prosody Transcription method for untrained listeners, which is used for quantifying prosodic prominence.

Cooperation with Jennifer Cole was of great benefit not only to Area A, which is concerned with prosodic prominence and its modelling and quantification, but also to the whole CRC, especially since she has worked intensively on the relation of prosodic prominence to meaning and discourse structure, and on the role of syntactic structure in guiding prosody perception.

Contact: jennifer.cole1(at)northwestern.edu

Andrew Kehler is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Califonia, San Diego (USA) where he heads the Computational Linguistics Lab. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of computational psycholinguistics of discourse and has had a major impact on the advancement of Bayesian modelling of pronoun resolution.

Andrew Kehler obtained his PhD in computer science from Harvard University. After working as senior computer scientist in the industry for five years, he became professor of linguistics at UC San Diego in 2000, where his main area of interest is discourse interpretation with a focus on coherence relations, inferences and pronoun interpretation. He currently serves as associate editor of the Journal of Logic and Computation and on a number of editorial boards, including the Journal of Semantics and Semantics and Pragmatics. His interdisciplinary research combines theoretical linguistic, psycholinguistic and computational linguistic models of discourse comprehension. Andrew Kehler's research profile made him an ideal Mercator Fellow within the CRC. The computational model of pronoun resolution that he developed contributed greatly to research in Area C, which is concerned with the modelling of discourse prominence. Cooperation was a great asset for other areas as well, since a probabilistic approach to prominence is highly relevant for prosodic and morphosyntactic prominence.

Contact: kehler(at)ling.ucsd.edu

Theodoros Marinis is Professor of Multilingualism & Language Development and Head of the Clinical Language Sciences Department in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading (UK). He is one of the most eminent researchers in the field of language acquisition and processing in interaction with literacy development, with a strong expertise in mixed model analyses of complex large data sets.

His main interests lie in bilingual/multilingual children with typical and atypical development (Specific Language Impairment, Autism) with a strong focus on morpho-syntax and up-to-date empirical methodology. He is currently involved in a very active research program involving English, Greek, and German, supervises a number of excellent junior researchers at the PhD and post-doc level, and has maintained DFG-funded collaborations before (most recently with Bittner/ZAS Berlin). Before his stay at the CRC, he supported several international interdisciplinary projects with great success as an outside advisor (cf. BALED/Tsimpli 2013-2015), and the CRC benefited greatly  from cooperation with Theodoros Marinis thanks to his linguistic as well as experimental expertise. CRC projects in Area C with a focus on processing and development, but also areas A and B (especially A02 and B06) gained valuable insights from his feedback on methodology and data analysis.

Contact: t.marinis(at)uni-konstanz.de

Bodo Winter is an Acting Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. He is a leading researcher in language evolution, quantitative semantics and statistical methods in linguistics, having published over 40 articles, including book chapters and journal papers in interdisciplinary high impact journals (Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Cortex). He has taught a variety of advanced statistics and data modelling courses for linguists at various international institutions and summer schools and held over 60 conference presentations and invited talks. After completing an M.A. in General Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mā noa and being a Doctoral Fellow in phonetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Bodo Winter obtained his PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced. His research focuses on large-scale quantitative analyses of corpora and lexica to study word meaning and how it changes over time.

Cooperation with Bodo Winter will be of great benefit because he has a background in phonetics, linguistics and cognitive science, making him ideal for this highly interdisciplinary collaborative research centre. Moreover, Bodo Winter has expert knowledge in statistical methods and modelling of dynamical systems that are useful for the proposed projects. Being able to consult him on advanced modelling topics remains an invaluable asset for the whole CRC, especially for Area A and Area C. Finally, Bodo Winter has already taught a number of advanced courses at the University of Cologne within the University-funded “Sprache im Labor” making him already familiar with the specific methodological demands of the projects involved.

Kontakt: b.winter(at)bham.ac.uk

Jesse Harris (UCLA, USA) worked as a guest researcher in project C05 from August 2022 until October 2022. He continues to collaborate with C05, especially on the topic of interaction between grammatical gender marking and perspective-taking. So far, this cooperation has led to several talks and presentations; joint publications are in the making.

Contact:

E-Mail: jharris(at)humnet.ucla.edu

Dr. Hae-Sung Jeon (University of Central Lancashire, UK) will be working as a guest researcher in project A02 from July to September 2023.

Hae-Sung's research concerns speech prosody and phonetic variation. She mainly uses behavioural experimentation, acoustic analysis and statistical modelling as research methods. Her research aims to improve our understanding of the relationship between prosodic properties in speech and linguistic structure and how listeners hear and interpret the speech signal. She has investigated these questions in various dialects and languages, using data from language users with heterogeneous demographic and linguistic profiles. She collaborates with speech researchers at Cologne to examine the relationship between the distribution of information load, morphosyntax and prosody in communicative situations and also intonational variation in Korean dialects.

Contact:

hjeon1(at)uclan.ac.uk

Dr. Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego) will be working as a guest researcher in project C07 during June and July 2023.

Andrew Kehler obtained his PhD in computer science from Harvard University. After working as senior computer scientist in the industry for five years, he became professor of linguistics at UC San Diego in 2000, where his main area of interest is discourse interpretation with a focus on coherence relations, inferences and pronoun interpretation. He currently serves as associate editor of the Journal of Logic and Computation and on a number of editorial boards, including the Journal of Semantics and Semantics and Pragmatics. His interdisciplinary research combines theoretical linguistic, psycholinguistic and computational linguistic models of discourse comprehension.

Contact:

akehler(at)ucsd.edu

Prof. Duygu Özge (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey) worked as a guest researcher in projects B04, C03, C04 and C05 from June until July 2022 and from September until October 2022.

Duygu Özge has a wide variety of research interests including examining how children learn, represent, and understand language, and how cognitive or social status (e.g., having an impairment or having a social disadvantage) might impact language processing and other cognitive abilities.

Contact:

E-Mail: duyguozge(at)gmail.com; duyguo(at)metu.edu.tr

Dr. Péter Rácz (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) will be working as a guest researcher in project B02 from June until August 2023.

Péter works on language learning. He is interested in the mental representation of word formation patterns and how these are shaped by cognitive constraints on learnability, memory integration, and the social dynamics of the language community. He works with experimental and corpus data and uses algorithmic learning models and quantitative methods.

Contact:

racz.peter.marton(at)ttk.bme.hu

Michelina (Elina) Savino is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Education, Psychology, Communication at the University of Bari, Italy. Her research interests are centered around prosody, both in terms of theory and in how prosody is used in discourse, especially how speakers structure their utterances and whether intonation contours, when strategically placed, aid recall. She also works on prosody in conversation, including phenomena such as turn-taking, back-channelling and accommodation/entrainment to the interlocutor. Her survey of question contours across the different varieties of Italian is an important work of reference.

She spent a total of six months at the CRC 1252 in 2021 and 2022, continuing her research together with members of projects A01 and C09.

Elina Savino has also worked together with Mercator Fellow Bodo Winter and Martine Grice on the effect of intonation on working memory, culminating in a publication in Psychonomic Bulletin Review (2020), entitled “Intonation does aid serial recall after all” in which – contrary to previous claims in the literature –  intonation has been shown to play a role in recall over and above that achieved by pauses. Currently she is working with members of A01 and C09 on a further study on the effect of intonation on serial recall, especially rising intonation. A further cooperation investigates the perceptual magnet effect from the native variety on the imitation of regional intonation contours.

Contact: michelina.savino(at)uniba.it oder msavino1(at)uni-koeln.de 

Prof. Dr. Irina Sekerina (CUNY, USA) worked as a guest researcher in project C07 from October 2022 until November 2022.

Contact:

E-Mail: Irina.Sekerina(at)csi.cuny.edu

Dr. Mortaza Taheri-Ardali is Assistant Professor of General Linguistics at Shahrekord University, Iran, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the University of Bamberg, and the University of Hamburg. His (2015) dissertation, entitled Prosody Modelling in Persian Text-to-Speech (TTS) Systems, was awarded a prize at the Festival for Top Dissertations: Production and Entrepreneurship in Humanities. Currently, his main areas of research and publication are Persian prosody, language documentation, Iran’s languages, and linguistic atlas. 

During his stay in Cologne from October 2022 through May 2023, he worked as a senior research fellow in project A04. Through this project, they recorded a group of Persian speakers to investigate prosodic prominence in Persian. In addition to this acoustic and kinematic study, a complementary perception test was conducted to assess the listeners’ perception of prosodic prominence in this language. And to capture variability in the production data, they also extended their kinematic and acoustic analysis by applying functional data analysis (FDA) to the different types of speech curves related to intonation and articulation of the prominent utterances in the recorded Persian corpus.

In addition to the prosodic studies, he is co-editor of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI). He is currently researching language distribution in the Lorestan Province of Iran. Furthermore, he has already carried out field research in Iran, specifically in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari, Hormozgan, Ilam, Zanjan, Semnan, Kermanshah, Hamadan, Gilan, and Lorestan Provinces.

Contact:

E-Mail: taheriling(at)gmail.com / taheri(at)sku.ac.ir

Prof. Dr. Alexandra (Sandra) Vella will be working as a guest researcher in project A01 from April 2023 to June 2023.

Alexandra Vella is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Insitute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta. Her research focuses on Phonetics and Phonology, particularly aspects of prosody such as stress, prosodic structure and intonation, including as manifestations of prominence more generally, in Maltese and its dialects, and in Maltese English, the variety of English of speakers of Maltese. With the aim of facilitating research leading to the development of speech technologies for Maltese, she is leading the project Korpus tal-Malti Mitkellem.

Her research on the prosodic structure of Maltese and Maltese English has led to a number of important insights relating to the intonational possibilities which are available for exploitation by the languages of the world. She has collaborated with Martine Grice and Anna Bruggeman in the area of intonational phonology (“Stress, pitch accent, and beyond: Intonation in Maltese questions” Journal of Phonetics) which examined wh-question intonation in Maltese and has provided evidence for tones characterised by pitch prominence but not associated with lexically stressed syllables. A further paper on Maltese and Maltese English intonation in general is under review. Together with Maria Lialiou, Aviad Albert and Martine Grice, the Maltese wh-question data has been revisited using periodic energy analysis (using the ProPer toolbox).

She will be spending two months in Cologne as a CRC Fellow and continues to work with members of the A01 project, who were recently hosted by the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta in order to run an experiment on the phenomenon of “stress deafness” in Maltese bilingual speakers: a paper presenting the results of this experiment will be presented at ICPhS 2023 which will be held in Prague.

Contact: alexandra.vella@um.edu.mt

Dr. Kofi Yakpo (University of Hong Kong) worked as a guest researcher in project A03 during April 2023.

Kofi Yakpo is Associate Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. His research addresses linguistic and social forces in the evolution of languages spoken in multilingual societies, in particular those of Africa and the Global African Diaspora. He has
published extensively, spanning linguistics, politics, music, and creative writing.
His books include:
A Grammar of Pichi (2019),
Boundaries and Bridges: Language Contact in Multilingual Ecologies (2017, with Pieter Muysken),
Code-switching Between Structural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (2015, with Gerald Stell).

During his time in Cologne, Kofi Yakpo looked at the role of
prominence in prosodic contact between tone and stress systems, with a
particular focus on the Afro-European Creole languages of the Atlantic
Basin, and gave a talk titled "Tone meets stress in the Afro-Atlantic: social context, typology, outcomes".

Contact:

kofi(at)hku.hk

Jennifer E. Arnold works in language psychology, studying the question of how we communicate with apparent and surprising ease. Her main goal is tracing the concrete mental steps that form the basis of speakers' capability to use and understand language. Her principal interest is thus in uncovering how speakers structure larger units of speech at both the production and interpretation ends. Jennifer E. Arnold has conducted various studies on referent management in general and pronoun resolution in particular and is considered one of the most influential researchers in these areas. She is also well-regarded as a cognition scholar due to her research into language usage, including its interplay with attention, motivation and alphabetization.

Jennifer E. Arnold's work interfaces with that of the CRC at multiple points. Her expertise in referent management - in both speech production and speech interpretation - is invaluable for the research conducted in area C, especially projects C04, C06 and C07. Her work on referent management from a language acquisition perspective is also of interest for project C03. Furthermore, as Jennifer E. Arnold has also studied the role of prosody in pronoun resolution, she was also able to contribute her findings to the work of area A, especially A01.

Contact: jarnold(at)email.unc.edu

Aroldo de Andrade is a researcher at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and does research on information structure, syntax and non-canonical constructions. He was a guest at the CRC from 22 November to 23 December 2019 and collaborated with projects C02, C04, C05 and C06. 

Contact: aroldo.andrade(at)gmail.com

T. Mark Ellison is a researcher from Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian's capital. He is a computational modeller. Synthesising a rich background in mathematics, computer science, linguistics, cognitive science and psychology, his research focuses on building principled accounts of linguistic processing and behaviour.  Recent research collaborations have developed models in fields as varied as experimental semiotics, language evolution, language diversity, bilingual cognition, and metaphor expression. 

T. Mark Ellison is currently based within the CRC Prominence in Language. As part of this work, he has been developing collaborations: interpreting the relationship between neural signals of surprise and prominence in expressions (in collaboration with project A01), creating a new algorithm for measuring periodic energy as one factor in phonetic prominence (A02), understanding the different roles of language frames (B05), and exploring the interaction of coindexing preferences with discourse prominence in German pronouns (C07).

Contact: tellison(at)uni-koeln.de

Manuel Leonetti was Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and one of the most renowned linguists in the Spanish-speaking world. His research focused on syntax, semantics and pragmatics, especially in the interface areas of these three fields. He published many relevant papers on nominal prominence properties such as definiteness and specificity, on focus and information structure, as well as on different prominence-dependent constructions such as zero subjects and differential object marking.

Manuel Leonetti's research is of key relevance for several projects of the CRC, especially in Area B. He mainly cooperated with B04, where he also supervised (using the Cotutela method) the dissertation of Diego Romero Heredero. Due to his outstanding expertise in the fields of (temporal) anaphors, null subjects and coherence relations, he also made highly relevant contributions to projects in Research Area C, including C02, C03 and C06, with all of which he had an intensive exchange of ideas during the workshop "Ways of Reference in Romance Languages" (Cologne, 27-28.09.2018).

We regret Manuel Leonetti's passing and are grateful to have known him.

Michelina (Elina) Savino is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Education, Psychology, Communication at the University of Bari, Italy. Her research interests are centred around prosody, both in terms of theory and in how prosody is used in discourse, especially how speakers structure their utterances and whether intonation contours, when strategically placed, aid recall. She also works on prosody in conversation, including phenomena such as turn-taking, back-channelling and accommodation/entrainment to the interlocutor. Her survey of question contours across the different varieties of Italian is an important work of reference.

She has spent a total of five months in Cologne during phase I of the CRC and has hosted members of project A01 in Bari, where experiments were run using a portable EEG system. This was the first time that EEG experiments have investigated the intonation of a Southern variety of Italian on site. The results are to appear in Neuroreport “Attention allocation in a language with post-focal prominences”. She has also collaborated on the perception of post-focal prominence in Italian L1 and German L2 listeners, a study that is currently under review.
Elina Savino has also worked together with Mercator Fellow Bodo Winter and Martine Grice on the effect of intonation on working memory, culminating in a publication in Psychonomic Bulletin Review (2020), entitled “Intonation does aid serial recall after all” in which – contrary to previous claims in the literature –  intonation has been shown to play a role in recall over and above that achieved by pauses. In June 2019 she co-organised a workshop with members of A01 and A02 in Bari on Prominence between Cognitive Functions and Linguistic Structures (CoFLiS).

Contact: michelina.savino(at)uniba.it or msavino1(at)uni-koeln.de.

Marc Swerts is a professor at the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences in the Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. His research focuses on non-verbal communication and the expansion of spoken dialogue systems. He is a cooperation partner of the project A03.

Contact: M.G.J.Swerts(at)tilburguniversity.edu

Norielle Adricula is a researcher and PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is completing her joint PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. She is interested in language, the mechanisms of sentence production, and what it can tell us about the interaction between language and cognition. Her research combines corpus analyses with psycholinguistic methods to investigate adults' and children's underlying conceptual representations and processes during language production and acquisition. 

During her stay in Cologne from May to November 2023, she will be working as a guest researcher in project B05 where she will examine the semantic and pragmatic prominence factors that influence voice in Tagalog.

Contact:

E-Mail: norielle.adricula(at)colorado.edu

Florence Baills (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain) worked as a guest researcher in project A07 from April 2022 until December 2022 (with a break in August).

Contact: 

E-Mail: fbaills(at)uni-koeln.de

Saverio Dalpedri (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) will be working as a guest researcher in project B08 from July 2023 until December 2023.

Contact:

saverio.dalpedri(at)uni-goettingen.de

Alessa Farinella (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA) worked as a guest researcher in project A03 from June 2022 until August 2022.

Contact:

E-Mail: afarinella(at)umass.edu

Daniela Mereu (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) worked as a guest researcher in project A02 from April 2022 until June 2022.

Contact:

E-Mail: Daniela.Mereu(at)unibz.it

Dr. Margreet Vogelzang (University of Cambridge, UK) worked as a guest researcher in project C03 from July 2022 until October 2022.

Contact:

E-Mail: mv498(at)cam.ac.uk

Betül Erbaşı (University of Southern California) was a guest researcher in project B04 from May through July 2019. As a PhD student, Betül collaborated with project B04 on topics around Turkish DOM and nominal semantics. 

Contact: betul.erbasi(at)gmail.com, semra.kizilkaya(at)uni-koeln.de

Zarina Levy-Forsythe (Ben Gurion University, Be'er-Sheva, Israel) was a guest researcher in project B04 during April and May 2019. As a PhD student, Zarina investigated Uzbek direct objects at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. She collaborated with project B04 on topics such as DOM in Uzbek, as well as partitivity in Turkic languages.

Contact: zarinale@post.bgu.ac.il

Valeria Lucarini (Scuola di Specializzazione in Psichiatria, Università degli Studi di Parma, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze) was a guest researcher in project A02.

During her stay, she worked on the research project A02 together with Francesco Cangemi, Juliane Zimmermann, Kai Vogeley and Martine Grice. This study was conducted not only on healthy persons, but also on persons with autism and persons with schizophrenia, whose social cognition is impaired and who thus exemplify disorders affecting information processing related to communication and interaction with others. This investigation into the perception of the interplay of communicatively conveyed visual nonverbal and auditory paraverbal information in persons with schizophrenia is also the topic of a thesis Valeria Lucarini wrote in the course of her specialisation in psychiatry in Italy.

In collaboration with members of A02, she published an overview article in which prosody is treated as a bridge between psychopathology and linguistics (Frontiers in Psychiatry) and has used conversational metrics to analyse speech in patients with schizophrenia (European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Language Resources and Evaluation, and European Psychiatry).

• Lucarini, Valeria, Francesco Cangemi, Benyamin Daniel, Jacopo Lucchese, Francesca Paraboschi, Chiara Cattani, Carlo Marchesi, Martine Grice, Kai Vogeley & Matteo Tonna. 2021. Conversational metrics, psychopathological dimensions and self-disturbances in patients with schizophrenia. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. | A02
• Lucarini, Valeria, Martine Grice, Francesco Cangemi, Juliane T. Zimmermann, Carlo Marchesi, Kai Vogeley & Matteo Tonna. 2020. Speech prosody as a bridge between psychopathology and linguistics: The case of the schizophrenia spectrum. Frontiers in Psychiatry, Section Social Cognition 11:531863. pdf | A02

Dària Serés stayed at the CRC as a guest researcher from April through June 2018. During her stay, she worked on her dissertation topic "The expression of genericity and (in)definiteness in languages with and without articles" under the direction of Prof. Dr. Klaus von Heusinger. Her thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Maria Teresa Espinal (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Dr. Olga Borik (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia).

While in Cologne, she developed the sections of her dissertation dealing with information structure and the interpretation of bare nominals in pre- and postverbal position in Russian, centering on the interplay of genericity and recency. Dària Serés also studied genericity at the sentence level and investigated how tense, mood and aspect influence the interpretation of generic sentences in Slavic, Romance and Germanic languages. To this end, she continued studying definition sentences, as these constitute an instance of genericity at the sentence and NP level. Furthermore, she worked on the characterization of statements expressing generalizations and regularities.

Contact: daria.seres(at)uab.cat

Heimir van der Feest Viðarsson was a guest researcher from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland. He stayed at our CRC from 1 ‒ 28 February 2019 and supported project C06.

Heimir van der Feest Viðarsson works on word order variation in subordinate clauses in (the history of) Icelandic. Subordinate clauses are a major linguistic pattern of expression for subordinating rhetorical relations. The project C06 benefited greatly from Heimir van der Feest Viðarsson’s expertise in subordinate clause syntax and his feedback on their studies on the role of syntax in the expression of discourse-structural subordination and the prominence asymmetries between main and subordinate clauses. The main aim of the collaboration was to compare the findings and develop a unified account.

Contact: hfv3(at)hi.is

Yuto Yamazaki, doctoral student at the University of Tokyo, was a guest researcher at the CRC 1252 from 27 January to 17 February 2020. He cooperated with project C04.

In his dissertation project, Yuto Yamazaki investigated the semantic relationship between the discourse structure and word order of cleft sentences in German. His research focused on the differences between canonical DO-Clefts (Es ist Hans, der kommt) and inverted DO-Clefts (Hans ist es, der kommt), which have different word order variants that are accompanied by two distinct interpretations. These constructions are also of particular interest for the SFB, since a number of projects are working on the discourse prominence of DO-Clefts.

Contact: clynelish14(at)gmail.com

Frank Kügler is Professor of Linguistics/Phonology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Before moving to Frankfurt he was associated with the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, with a Heisenberg stipend (02/2017 - 05/2018). His main research areas in the area of prosody are the interaction between tone and intonation, prosodic typology, prosodic phrasing and recursivity, and annotation and modelling of intonation. There is close collaboration on prosody in project A01 with Stefan Baumann and in A02 with Martine Grice. Together with Martine Grice he is editing a special issue of the journal Language and Speech on the topic  "Prosodic Prominence - A Cross-linguistic Perspective" (Grice and Kügler (eds.)).

Contact: kuegler(at)em.uni-frankfurt.de

Alexander Coupe spent a total of 9 months between 2016 and 2018 as an Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow visiting Birgit Hellwig (Project B02) and also worked with B05 (Himmelmann) and B03 (Dimmendaal/Reinöhl).

He received his doctorate from La Trobe University in Melbourne (Australia) in 2004 and has been at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore since 2009. He is an expert on the languages of Northeast India and researches Tibeto-Burman languages and the linguistic contact between Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan languages intensely. Among other things, Alexander Coupe works on differential argument marking concerning these languages and is therefore an important cooperation partner for B02, B03 and B05.

Contact: arcoupe(at)ntu.edu.sg

Diana Kolev (neé Dimitrova) was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a guest of Martine Grice (projects A01 and A02) from 2016 to 2018, while also being active in project C03 (Bongartz/Torregrossa). Diana Kolev finished her PhD at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands in 2012 in Psycholinguistics. In her studies she researched what roles intonation and structure of information have in the processing of language in the brain. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders institute of cognitive neuroscience in Nijmegen, Netherlands, she explored the connection between intonation and gestures as well as the importance of concentration and memory in the processing of language. During her time as Humboldt research fellow, Diana Kolev further developed this interest.

During her stay in Cologne, she researched how individuals differ in terms of how they produce and perceive relevant information. Here, Diana Kolev focused on the question of whether these individual differences can be explained by cognitive capacities like concentration and remembrance potential.

Contact: diana.kolev(at)mercator.uni-koeln.de

Jaklin Kornfilt is a Humboldt Prize winner and a regular guest at the Institute for German Language and Literature I at the University of Cologne, where she works with Prof. Klaus von Heusinger and his team on questions of the syntax-semantics interface.

Jaklin Kornfilt studied in Heidelberg. She received her doctorate in Harvard under the supervision of Noam Chomksy and Susumo Kuno. Jaklin Kornfilt has been Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University in New York since 1984 and was awarded the Humboldt Research Prize in 2010 for her outstanding achievements in research and teaching. During this award ceremony, she was a guest of Klaus von Heusinger at the Institute of Linguistics and the Research Association for Language and Cognition at the University of Stuttgart from 2010 to 2011.

She is one of the most renowned linguists in the field of Turkish linguistics. Her research areas in syntax and typology are not limited to the Turkic languages, but extend to Altaic and Germanic languages.

She is currently working with Klaus von Heusinger on a joint project on "Partitivity in Altaic Languages" and supporting project B04.

Contact: kornfilt(at)syr.edu

Anna Pineda was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in project B04 (García García / von Heusinger) for a total of 18 months starting June 1, 2021. She received her PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2014 and was at the Sorbonne Université (Paris IV), UFR de Langue française, where she conducted research in the project "Comparing Romance Languages through History (CoRaLHis): building a multilingual parallel diachronic corpus (13th - 18th century)". 

Contact: info(at)annapineda.cat

Marco Antonio Rocha Martins is a linguistics professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianopolis, Brasil and worked with Martin Becker (C02) in Cologne for research purposes from September 2018 until October 2019. During this time, Marco Rocha Martins took part in a Capes-Humboldt-Researchscholarship program by the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung.

Together with Izete Coelho, he coordinates the project "History of Brazilian Portuguese - from Europe to America" ("História do português brasileiro - desde a Europa até a America") of the Latin American Association for Linguistics and Philology (ALFAL).

In the years 2016 to 2018, he coordinated the linguistic department’s graduate program at UFSC, from 2014 to 2017 he was editor-in-chief of the journal of the linguistic association GELNE, Grupo de Estudos Linguísticos do Nordeste, of which he was also chairman (2010-2014). He coordinated sociolinguistic research group ANPOLL (Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Letras e Linguística) from 2010-2014, and additionally functioned as vice president of the Brasilian linguistics association (ABRALIN: Associação Brasileira de Linguística) from 2011-2013.

He received his doctorate in 2009 with a thesis on syntactic language change ("Competição de gramáticas do português na escrita catarinense dos séculos XIX e XX" ("Competing grammars of written Portuguese in 19th and 20th century Santa Catarina").

Marco Rocha Martins researches morphosyntactic and syntactic phenomena of Brazilian Portuguese in the past and present, combining modern socio- or variety linguistics with current syntax and language transformation theory. Furthermore, he deals with different aspects of grammar teaching and its relevance to the Brazilian school and education system.

During his stay in Cologne, Marco Rocha Martins researched the development of the system of clitics in Brazilian Portuguese and its change from the late 18th to the beginning of the 20th century. Besides this, he also taught a master course with Martin Becker on the topic: Language change - theory and empirical studies using the example of Brazilian Portuguese.

Contact: marco.martins(at)ufsc.br

Alina Tigău (University of Bucharest, Romania) worked at the CRC 1252 as a Humboldt research fellow from November 2016 to November 2018, studying the semantics of case in Romanian, while also teaching at the University of Bucharest, where she has had a position of Associate Professor at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures since 2016.

Alina Tigău received her PhD degree in 2010 in Bucharest, with a thesis devoted to the syntax and semantics of the direct object in Romance and Germanic languages. In her former research, she focused on Differential Object Marking, a form of case alternation which occurs in Romanian, Spanish and Turkish a.o. Her research has already provided new fundamental insights into the function of case in Romanian and other languages.

During and after her fellowship, she collaborated with Klaus von Heusinger on a project on ditransitive constructions, supporting project B04.

Contact: alina.tigau(at)lls.unibuc.ro

For the automatic creation of fictional texts using artificial intelligence (AI), the Cologne media technology company "ella" and the subproject C05 are cooperating. For this, C05 contributes to the quality control of the AI texts. Firstly, scientific quality criteria will be established, on the basis of which the texts will be then empirically analyzed and evaluated. Secondly, the results are re-integrated back into the ella-AI. Click here for the press release (in German, October 2019).

Contact: Stefan Hinterwimmer, hinterwimmer(at)uni-wuppertal.de.

The interdisciplinary research cooperation "Visual and auditory perception processes in people with autism spectrum disorders" between the Institute of Linguistics and Phonetics and the University Hospital of Cologne investigates the communicative behaviour of people with autism in order to gain a better understanding of the strengths and challenges of this group and thus support communication.

The interdisciplinary research group „Brain modulation and speech motor control“ is a collaboration between phoneticians (Institute of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Cologne) and neurologists (working group „Motor Disorders and Deep Brain Stimulation“, University Clinic, University of Cologne). Together, we investigate the connection between motor disorders and speech motor skills, for example in people with Morbus Parkinson or Essential Tremor, also taking into account effects that can be obtained using Deep Brain Stimulation as a form of therapy. Apart from clinical testing of the speech system, such as diadochokinesis or syllable production tasks, we focus mostly on prosodic aspects, such as marking of prosodic prominence in natural sentence production, and their relevance for speech therapy. Together with the CRC, we organized the international conference „Neurospeech 22“ and, within the context of the CRC, mentor doctoral students seeking to build an interdisciplinary profile.