I am interested in morphology, syntax, semantics, and linguistic typology. I am particularly fascinated by the syntax-semantics interface of argument linking and voice relations, and by the properties of experiencer predicates.
My past and ongoing research work includes the following topics:
- object-experiencer verbs
- light verb constructions
- differential object marking
- middle voice & anticausative constructions
- interaction of valency operations & combinatorics of voice markers
I work on several languages and families, among them Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan (Romance), German, Danish (Germanic), Turkish (Turkic) and recently, I have also been exploring data from Setswana, Gĩkũyũ and Kinyarwanda (Bantu) and Kannada (Dravidian).
My PhD project is entitled Alternations of Object-Experiencer Predicates. My advisors are Jens Fleischhauer and Kilu von Prince.
As part of Rolf Kailuweit’s research group at the Department of Romance Linguistics of HHU Düsseldorf, I worked on a project about the morphosyntactic and semantic variation of object-experiencer verbs in several Romance languages. Our research was mainly based on corpus data, but we also planned an experimental study together with Carmen Pietropaolo. We still cooperate on some research questions: Within a comparative corpus study on a selected set of Romance object-experiencer verbs, I am responsible for the description of Portuguese data and for the cross-linguistic quantitative analysis. We presented some findings at the German-Catalan Conference in Bern and in a panel on Catalan psych predicates at the University of the Balearic Islands, and we are currently working on a paper. In September 2023, we hosted a workshop on psych predicates on Romance languages, featuring talks by several international experts as well as contributions by MA students. The workshop is part of a DAAD-funded cooperation with Elga Cremades (UIB Palma, Spain). We are currently preparing the publication of an edited volume based on the workshop.
Still at HHU Düsseldorf, I am continuing my research on object-experiencer verbs in the environment of Kilu von Prince‘s research group at the Department of General Linguistics. I expanded the scope of my PhD project to light verb constructions with experiencer objects and their alternation-like relation to lexically corresponding simplex verbs. What started as a small side project together with my fellow PhD student Dila Turus, who was working in Jens Fleischhauer’s DFG-funded project „Funktionsverbgefüge: Familien und Komposition (FFK)“ , has given rise to three conference talks and two accepted papers.
At the moment my effort concentrates on finalizing my dissertation. When I need a break from writing, I spend some time on developing a new line of research on the combinatorics of voice markers.
In an ongoing project on urban linguistic fieldwork, I work with speakers of Pontic Greek, Kinyarwanda, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Wolof (and maybe more languages in the future). Within that project, Ana Krajinović and I first taught a seminar in 2022, where we supervised student research groups that worked on topics in those languages. After receiving a grant for a continuation and elaboration of the project, we are now building up relations to more language communities in Düsseldorf. In the summer semester 2023 I co-taught another hands-on class on urban fieldwork with Kilu von Prince. The third edition is planned (and funded) for the summer semester 2025, focussing on Wolof, and collaborating with Jäppoo NRW e.V., a Senegalese cultural association in our region.
A list of my publications and presentations is available here.