Current Research Topics
Please find a list of my current research topics below; related conference and workshop presentations are listed.
Social meaning and register variation
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07 Mar 2025 — Expressivity and situational variation: towards a linking hypothesis.
Talk at Expressivity: Variation and Change, Workshop at 47th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS 2025), Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany. -
15 Nov 2023 — Social meaning has multiple sources: Form vs. meaning-driven variation.
Talk at Social Meaning Berlin 2023, Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin, Germany. Joint work with Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt. -
11 Oct 2023 — Social meaning has multiple sources: Form vs. meaning-driven variation.
Talk at Semantics and Philosophy in Europe 12, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France. Joint work with Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt. -
11 Nov 2022 — Situational biases in diachrony: how register distinctions emerge.
Talk at Formal Diachronic Semantics (FoDS 7), Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary.
Context-dependency in formal semantics and pragmatics
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18 Nov 2022 — Homogeneity Removal as a Local Phenomenon.
Talk at 1st Workshop on Homogeneity and Non-Maximality in Plural Predication and Beyond. -
16 Jun 2022 — Plurality and embedded questions: experimental investigations on homogeneity and cumulativity.
Talk at Workshop on Current Trends in Semantics (Invited), HU Berlin.
Historical sociolinguistics
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23 May 2025 — Literacy, gender, and the emergence of a novel perfect construction in 19th-century Icelandic personal letters.
Talk at Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference 2025, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. -
25 Jan 2025 — Samspil kyns, stĂ©ttar og menntunar Ă ĂştbreiĂ°slu lokins horfs meĂ° bĂşinn Ă Ăslenskum sendibrĂ©fum frá 19. öld
(Gender, social class, and education in the spread of the periphrastic perfect with bĂşinn in 19th-century Icelandic personal letters).
Talk at 38th Rask Conference of the Icelandic Linguistics Society, Institute for Linguistics, University of Iceland, ReykjavĂk, Iceland.
Project Involvement
Here are the projects I’ve been involved in over the course of my career.
Researcher (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin)
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Associated with the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation”
Project A10 – Doubling and Register Variation
PIs: Artemis Alexiadou, Viola Schmitt
Period: 01.2024 – Present
Project A10 investigates seemingly optional morphosyntactic doubling (e.g. two comparative morphemes in more taller) and its implications for how situational dimensions interface with speakers’ choices among available alternatives. Doubling introduces redundancy, which we hypothesise to be advantageous in contexts involving uncertainty about the current question under discussion.
Doctoral Researcher (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin)
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)
Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation”
Project A05 – Modeling Meaning-Driven Register Variation
PIs: Uli Sauerland, Stephanie Solt
Period: 09.2020 – 12.2023
Project A05 examines the case of alternatives that are not semantically equivalent, unlike prototypical sociolinguistic variables. Alternations of this nature are often register-sensitive. This perspective sheds novel light on the interface between situational variation and the core grammatical apparatus.
Universität Potsdam
Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1287 “Limits of Variability in Interpretation”
Project C02 – Limits of Cross-Linguistic Variability in the Interpretation of Underspecified Structures
PIs: Malte Zimmermann, Alexander Koller
Period: 01.2019 – 09.2019
Universität Potsdam
XPRAG.de Project ExQ – Exhaustiveness in Embedded Questions from an Experimental and Cross-Linguistic Perspective
PIs: Malte Zimmermann, Edgar Onea
Period: 09.2017 – 01.2019