Welcome to the Chair of Spanish and French Linguistics!
We are an international team of linguists with a special interest in Romance and American languages and cultures.
We research and publish on topics including linguistic variability, language contact and multilingualism, syntax and pragmatics of interrogative sentences, intonation and information structure, as well as the preservation of indigenous languages and other topics concerning linguistic and cultural diversity and sustainability.
We offer courses for Romance languages and cross-linguistic courses on diverse linguistic and interdisciplinary topics, about which you can inform yourself on the individual faculty pages if you are interested. We also focus on the implementation of international courses using and further developing digital methods.
News from the Chair
On 1 July 2026, Tourism Watch published a blog post by Melanie Uth entitled “Travel Guidebooks as Educational Media?”
Talks in june 2026:
June 3rd, 4:00 p.m.: Jan Fliessbach and Johanna Rockstroh (University of Bremen): “Top-k translation analysis as a window into hidden variability: Evidence from French wh-questions” as part of the Linguistic Lecture Series des Zentrums Sprache - Variation - Mehrsprachigkeit. Universität Potsdam, Campus Am Neuen Palais, Building 8, Room 0.58
June 3rd, 11:00 a.m.: Élodie Blestel (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Melanie Uth: “Mettre l’Autre en récit : discours touristiques, altérités rentables et justice linguistique” as part of the 7e Congrès du Réseau Francophone de Sociolinguistique. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Campus Nation, Salle B11
June 8th, 11:30 a.m.: Patrick Auhagen, Jan Fliessbach and Melanie Uth: "Regional Variation in Resumptive Relative Clauses in European Spanish: Evidence from Multi-Scalar Acceptability Judgments" as part of the workshop Register at the Interface of Socio-Geographic Variation des SFB 1412 “Register”. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Main Building.
We cordially invite you to the Linguistic Lecture Series im Sommersemester 2026 Thema “KI und Sprache” - on "AI and Language" – a cooperation between the Centre for Language – Variation – Multilingualism and the Institute of Romance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
New publication in Journal of Pragmatics:
We are delighted that the article “In search of the hidden path: The zero-encoding construction in satellite-framed English and verb-framed French” by Wojciech Lewandowski and Jan Fliessbach has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Pragmatics and is expected to appear in 2026.
Start of new research project:
In 2026 we started (In)variable Resumption in Relativsätzen: Spanisch im Vergleich zu anderen romanischen Sprachen as an SFB 1287 project! The team comes in form of a collaboration between Patrick Auhagen, Iñaki Cano, Jan Fliessbach, Álvaro Ugarte Isla and Melanie Uth.