Semantics

Our research focuses on the compositional derivation of sentence meanings from their atomic parts, adopting an explicit cross-linguistic perspective:

Next to the semantics of well-researched Indo-European languages (German, English), a special focus lies on the semantics of West African languages (Kwa, Chadic, Grassfield Bantu) and Vietnamese. Among the phenomena investigated are: Compositional Mechanisms, Information Structure, Question Semantics, Quantification, Tense and Aspect, Discourse Particles, Exhaustivity, (In)Definiteness.

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

• C02: Limits of cross-linguistic variability in the interpretation of underspecified structures

An overview of further projects can be found here.