Dr. Giuseppe Varaschin
Faculty of Language Sciences
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
10099 Berlin Germany
email: giuseppe.varaschin (at) hu-belin.de
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My research engages with theoretical syntax and semantics and their interfaces, with a recurring focus on the nominal domain (e.g. anaphora, φ-features, definiteness). A central concern of mine is how much of the distribution and (un)acceptability of nominals follows from syntax proper, and how much of it follows from the way structure interfaces with meaning and use. Most of my work keeps a thin residue of strictly local syntactic conditions, granting a larger role for semantics, pragmatics, processing, and, increasingly, the social meanings that forms carry.
I approach these questions through formally explicit, theory-driven analysis grounded in cross-linguistic data, drawing on both generative and model-theoretic formalisms and, increasingly, on experimental methods. I am especially interested in the architecture and formal foundations of grammars: for instance, in how constraints on the descriptive vocabulary of syntactic theory, such as the inventory of features, can predict patterns of variation across and within languages. In my dissertation and in subsequent work -- including my book Deconstructing Syntactic Theory (OUP, 2025) -- I develop a parallel architecture of grammar with an expanded lexicon of both words and local phrasal schemas, asking how far grammatical patterning can be explained without elaborate syntactic machinery.
My current work in Project A04 of the Register CRC at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where I was previously a Humboldt Research Fellow, carries this program to the interface between morphosyntactic form and sociolinguistics. Building on formal theories of expressive and use-conditional content, I treat socio-expressive meanings as compositional objects that grammatical theory can refer to and generalize over.
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