Creativity in (morpho)syntax: The role of analogy

From April 2024 to December 2028, Jutta-Maria Hartmann and I are PIs on the project A01 Creativity in (morpho)syntax: The role of analogy, which is part of the collaborative research centre (SFB) Creativity in Linguistic Communication, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), at Bielefeld University.

This project investigates the role of analogy in the formation of novel, creative morphological forms and syntactic structures both within and across languages. In particular, the project hypothesises that the existence of a grammatical structure can lead to novel, structurally similar expressions which are well-formed in a specific context, even though they are not accepted as grammatical by the speech community. We investigate this hypothesis experimentally for long-distance agreement in Hungarian, as well as embedded clauses in German and other languages.

Case and agreement in ditransitive constructions

From September 2019 to September 2020, I was a post-doc at Leiden University, working on a project on ditransitive constructions awarded through the LEaDing Fellows programme, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action COFUND programme, funded in part by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.

I used a so-called “typological gap”, that is a type of language we can describe but that is not found anywhere in the world, to study variation in the expression of case and agreement in ditransitive constructions. You can find more about the project here.

Prominent possessors

In 2017 to 2018, I was a member of the AHRC-funded project Prominent Possessors at SOAS University of London and worked with Irina Nikolaeva (PI), Oliver Bond, and Greville Corbett.

The project dealt with possessive constructions in which a noun phrase-internal possessor behaves as if it were external to the noun phrase, for example with respect to agreement or switch-reference.

You can find publications and more information here.