Morphosyntax

The group is concerned with grammatical variation between the languages of the world in the area of sentence and word structure and the (un)attested patterns in formal models of grammar.

The research focuses on:

• Case and agreement (differential argument encoding, case stacking, scale effects, syncretism, portmanteaux, syntactic vs. semantic agreement)
• Dependency formation (movement vs. base formation, post-syntactic operations)
• Locality (long movement, switch reference, non-local case assignment, movement reflexes, resumption, islands)
• Extraction asymmetries (sharing constructions such as ATB-movement, subjects vs. non-subjects)
• NP syntax (possession, DP vs. NP)
• grammatical changes of function (possessor raising, inversion, passive voice)
• Type and interaction of elementary morphosyntactic operations (rule order, derivation vs. representation)

Speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre 1287 Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational, and Grammatical Aspects

• C05: Hidden Variability in Sharing Constructions within the DFG-funded CRC 1287 ‘Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational and Grammatical Aspects’ at the University of Potsdam, 07/2021- 12/2025
• MGK: Integrated Research Training Group as part of the DFG-funded CRC 1287 ‘Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational and Grammatical Aspects’ at the University of Potsdam, 07/2021- 12/202525
• Z: Central Administrative Project as part of the DFG-funded CRC 1287 ‘Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational and Grammatical Aspects’ at the University of Potsdam, 10/2022 - 12/20255
• Project C05 ‘The Limits of Variability in Extraction Asymmetries’, part of the DFG-funded CRC 1287 ‘Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational and Social Aspects’ at the University of Potsdam, 07/2017- 06/2021

An overview of further projects can be found here.