My research focus is the syntax-semantics interface, in synchrony, diachrony, contact and acquisition. I use computational and corpus linguistic methods and tools and develop resources, mainly for French and Italian.
Most of my current research is related to the links between language change and language acquisition, the topic of the previous DFG research unit SILPAC.
Recent or ongoing collaborations:
With a group of historical linguists and psycholinguists in SILPAC.
With Charles Yang and Jordan Kodner on the modelling of language change.
With Michelle Troberg on change and acquisition of French datives.
On Old French: with the CNRS Lattice, the ANR Profiterole project and the ihrim lab at the ENS de Lyon.
For an overview of my research, see my ORCID record: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8848-1977
starting 2027: DFG research project "Dynamics of Grammatical Stability (DyGram)".
[Preliminary organisation website (GitHub)]
2022-2026: DFG research unit FOR 5157 "Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC)". [SILPAC group website] [DFG Gepris research unit description]
Project H2 "Change and acquisition of verbal structures": [SILPAC project website] [DFG Gepris project description]
2015-2021: Borrowing of Argument Structure in Contact Situations: The Case of Medieval English under French influence (BASICS), co-directed with Carola Trips, Universität Mannheim, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
2016-2018: Senior staff member of the eHumanities “Center for Reflected Text Analytics” (CRETA), funded by the German ministry of education and research (BMBF) within the research programme eHumanities.
1.7.2014-30.6.2018: SFB 732/B5 (3rd funding period)
Polysemy in a Conceptual System (PICS), research project B5 in the DFG research cluster 732 Incremental Specification in Context. [some lexical resources from this project]
1.7.2014-30.6.2017: Research incentive (Universität Stuttgart Forschungsfonds)
Grammatical Analysis, Ancient Language and Computation (GRAAL&Co) a «start-up»-project incentive for interdisciplinary linguistic research. The project develops new methods for research on Old French and provides new NLP tools and resources as well as input to the DFG BASICS research proposal(s).
1.7.2010-30.6.2014: SFB 732 graduate school
Co-director of the SFB 732 graduate school Incremental Specification in Context (with Pr. Grzegorz Dogil)
1.7.2010-30.6.2014: SFB 732/B5 (2nd funding period)
Polysemy in a Conceptual Systems (PICS), project B5 of SFB 732 Incremental Specification in Context.
1.3.2009-29.2.2012: German-French ANR/DFG project Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF), in coorperation with CNRS Lattice (Paris) und ENS of Lyon: syntactic annotation of Old French texts (from the Nouveau Corpus d'Amsterdam and the Base de français médiéval).
1.7.2006-30.6.2010: SFB 732/B5 (1st funding period)
Polysemy in a Conceptual System (PICS), project B5 of SFB 732 Incremental Specification in Context.
1.3.2009-30.6.2010: SFB 732/B2 (continuation, 2nd funding period)
Funktionsweise und diachrone Entwicklung deverbaler Nominalisierungsverfahren im Französischen und Italienischen (project B2 of SFB 732, continuation of the project directed by Martin Becker until 2009)
1.3.2005-31.5.2009: German-French graduate school
International extension of the DFG graduate school no. 609 «Sprachliche Repräsentationen und ihre Interpretation», in cooperation with the École Doctorale «Cognition, Langage, Interaction» Paris 8 (proposal co-authored with Brenda Laca, Paris 8).
30.4.2003-30.4.2006: TransCoop-Programme
Computer-assisted annotation and lexicographic analysis of French medieval text corpora, in cooperation with Pierre Kunstmann (University of Ottawa), TransCoop programme DEU/1112357 funded by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.