Research

My research is concerned with the architecture of language and its formal and computational modelling (also on the basis of experimental results), with a special focus on clitics, ambiguities, the exploration of the syntax-prosody interface, and phonology in general.

Funded projects:

Projects I have been involved in: Thesis: The Syntax-Prosody Interface in Lexical-Functional Grammar

My thesis develops a representation of phonological structure and discusses its relation to syntax in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) from the perspective of production as well as comprehension. It approaches the relation between syntax and phonology/prosody from several perspectives by discussing different grammatical phenomena, which are problematic to the prosody-syntax interface. On the one hand, the thesis focusses on syntactic ambiguities (as they are, for example, resulting from the German case system), which are difficult to handle by an only-syntactic model, but can be resolved by taking prosodic cues into consideration. On the other hand, the thesis also discusses several types of (endo-)clitics (in Swabian, Pashto, and Degema) because these clitics are typical border elements between the different modules and provide interesting insights into the architecture of grammar. The resulting interface enables a modular integration of phonology/prosody into the LFG framework and allows for a straightforward analysis of complex language phenomena like, for example, Pashto second position endoclisis.