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) from June 2021 through August 2022. She received her PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2014. Before her stay in Cologne, she was at the Sorbonne Université (Paris IV), UFR de Langue française and 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

Alena Witzlack-Makarevich received her doctorate from Leipzig University in 2011 and worked at the University of Zurich and University of Kiel before starting her current position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2018. She is an expert in typology of grammatical relations and worked extensively on differential argument marking and differential indexing. She, furthermore, is an expert on Great Lakes Bantu languages of East Africa and Khoe-Kwadi and Tuu languages of southern Africa.

Alena will spend her sabbatical (from September 2024 until September 2025) in Cologne. During her stay, she will work on differential argument marking and aspects of prominence and accessibility of discourse entities in Khoekhoe (Khoe-Kwadi) and Ruuli (East Bantu) and will be cooperating with project B02.

Contact: witzlack@gmail.com