I am a theoretical linguist as well as a fieldworker. I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Manchester. I was trained at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany (from which I also received my Ph.D. in 2015), the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the United States, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver in Canada.

Broadly speaking, I investigate how meaning emerges from the interaction of syntactic structure, lexical information, composition principles and context. I am particularly interested in how far this interaction is subject to crosslinguistic variation, and in the repercussions of this variation for first language acquisition and processing.

Topics I haved worked on or am working on include the crosslinguistic representation of scalarity in the grammar, the acquisition of comparison constructions, the architecture of tense and modality at Logical Form, as well as the grammar of alternatives.

What’s new?

– Ryan Bochnak, Eva Csipak, Lisa Matthewson, Marcin Morzycki, and Daniel Reisinger at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver have put together a wonderful Festschrift for Hotze Rullmann, entitled The Title of this Volume Is Shorter Than Its Contributions Are Allowed to Be. In it, Siena Weingartz, Marion Boomars and I discuss “Variable Strength in Necessity Modality: A Case of Variation between Afrikaans, Dutch, English, and German“. Proficiat, Hotze!

– Out now, in the November 2024 issue of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory: “Language Change and the Degree Semantics Parameter“, which investigates Beck et al. (2009)‘s influential Degree Semantics Parameter from a diachronic angle: Does the semantics of gradable predicates ever change from delineation to degree-based? If so, what are the pathways of this change. The answers I provide are based on a case study of the grammar of comparison in Samoan. 

– Daniel Altshuler (University of Oxford) and I have just signed a contract with Routledge to edit a Handbook of Crosslinguistic Semantics, to be published within the Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics series. Stay tuned, and do get in touch if you are interested in getting involved. 

– I am pleased to announce that the Faculty Promotions Committee approved my promotion to Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, with effect from August 2024!

– Ryan Walter Smith (Ohio State University) and I discuss a lesser studied but well known type of inversion illusion in our poster for this year’s Semantics and Linguistic Theory, arguing that “Scope, Monotonicity and Maximal Informatively cannot be underestimated“. Click here to access the poster, and please check back again soon for the proceedings paper!

– No head injury is too insignificant to ignore! Nadine Bade (Universität Potsdam) and I argue in our proceedings paper for the 2022 Amsterdam Colloquium that the depth-charge illusion is not an illusion, but can receive a compositional analysis. Read the full paper here, or download our poster for a quick summary here. Comments and questions welcome!