Institut für Linguistik

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

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Welcome

Welcome to the Institute of Linguistics! On this website you can find all the important information about the institute.

Sinn und Bedeutung 30 (SuB30) 2025 in Frankfurt

The 30th edition of Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB30) will take place at Goethe University Frankfurt from September 23–27, 2025, organized by the Semantics professorship.

The conference will feature:

For more information please visit https://vicom.info/sub30/. 

Best student presentation of MMSYM 2024 is from Frankfurt

Employee and doctoral student Alina Gregori as well as Vera Wolfrum (Uni Würzburg) win the award for the best student presentation at this year’s MMSYM.

Best student presentation of Speech-Prosody 2024 is from Frankfurt

Employee and doctoral student Anna Preßler wins the award for the best student presentation at this year’s Speech-Prosody Conference.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prizes for International German Studies awarded to Ermenegildo Bidese

Ermenegildo Bidese (University of Trento) completed his habilitation in the Department of Modern Philology in Frankfurt in 2021. In 2024 he received the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prizes for International German Studies from the DAAD.

End of Seminars = Start of Term Papers

With the conclusion of the lecture period, the work on the term papers begins. We kindly request all students writing term papers or theses in linguistics to follow our guidelines.

We celebrate Katharina Hartmann’s 60th birthday

During the birthday workshop “Syntax in Focus – A workshop in honour of Katharina Hartmann’s 60th birthday” we presented the festschrift in honour of Katharina on January 12, 2024: “To the left, to the right, and much in between“. It can be downloaded for free as an e-book (PDF) here.

We congratulate the Institute of Linguistics on the newly approved special research area NegLaB

From April 2024, the new DFG special research area “Negation in Language and Beyond” (SFB 1629 NegLaB) will start at Goethe University. The Institute of Linguistics is significantly involved in numerous projects at the SFB.

MA student Farbod Eslami Khouzani receives this year’s DAAD Prize

The MA linguistics student Farbod Eslami Khouzani (picture, middle) received this year’s DAAD Prize for international students on October 5th, 2023. His outstanding academic achievements as well as his social commitment were recognized. We congratulate him! More information

Prof. Katharina Hartmann and Prof. Frank Kügler nominated for the best doctoral supervision

The Goethe Research Academy for Early Career Researchers (GRADE) awards a prize every year for the best doctoral supervision. This year, two of the professors from linguistics have been nominated: Prof. Frank Kügler and Prof. Katharina Hartmann. More information

Information for freshman/beginners

 

Information for students

Studies

The Department of Linguistics at Goethe University Frankfurt offers in collaboration with the Department of English and American Studies, the Department of Psycholinguistics and the Teaching of German, and the Department of Romance Literatures and Languages two linguistic programs, a BA Linguistik taught in German and an  MA Linguistics taught in English. In addition, the Department takes part in the BA Germanistik and in the Teacher Education Program.

Further information:

Research

​Overview about the research at the institute

  

 

The Institute of Linguistics, which is based in the Faculty of  Modern Languages (FB 10), has special expertise in the fields of language structure (syntax and phonology), semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics (language acquisition, language processing), and historical linguistics, and represents known researchers. In addition, there are close contacts and cooperation with the linguists in the Institutes of English and Romance Studies, with philosophy (Faculty of Philosophy and History, FB 08), and the Institute for Empirical Linguistics (Faculty ofLinguistics and Cultural Studies, FB 09).

Besides the Institute of Linguistics, there is also research and teaching in linguistics in other institutes. More details can be found here:

The potential of the Frankfurt linguistics is especially in the realm of foundational research in linguistics. The active research is bundled in various projects.

Talk by Corien Bary and Harriet Yates (Nijmegen) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Corien Bary and Harriet Yates (Nijmegen) in the Semantics Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link. 

Date: May 22, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: fEMG as a window into conversational commitments: validating the method and further applications (joint work with Bob van Tiel and Peter de Swart)

Abstract: 
This presentation explores the assignment of commitments in conversation. While theoretical work has explored the range of commitment-bearing acts, key questions remain unresolved, such as the role of addressees, the gradability of commitment, and the effect of evidentials. To empirically address these questions, we propose facial electromyography (fEMG) as a novel method in this field, to detect implicit affective reactions to commitment violations. We present our proof-of-method study which demonstrates that commitment violations elicit strong ‘frowning’ corrugator muscle activation (associated with negative affect). In an ongoing follow-up study we apply this method to measure the effect of reportative evidentiality. Specifically, we test whether indicating hearsay evidence for one’s claim modulates perceived speaker commitment and whether the syntactic form (here, embedding vs. parenthetical constructions) makes a difference. The findings highlight fEMG’s potential to uncover subtle norms in conversation, with implications for pragmatics, semantics, and multimodal communication.

Talk by Sebastian Walter (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Walter (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link. 

Date: May 15, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Adding to the expressive typology: Emblematic gestures as visual expressives (joint work with Cornelia Ebert)

Abstract: 
Emblematic gestures are gestures with a conventionalized form and meaning within a linguistic community. For example, if a speaker in the German-speaking community taps their index finger on their temple, it indicates that they believe the person being referred to is crazy (CRAZY-gesture, henceforth). These gestures differ significantly from iconic gestures, which are typically unconventionalized and depict specific aspects of their referent. While recent work in gesture semantics has largely focused on iconic gestures and their contribution to the meaning of the utterance they co-occur with (e.g., Ebert & Ebert, 2014; Schlenker, 2018), emblems have received comparatively little attention (but see Esipova, 2019). In descriptive work, however, they have been argued to closely resemble interjections, such as ouch (e.g., Poggi, 1983, 1987).

In this talk, we observe that emblematic gestures meet all six criteria of expressive content (e.g., the criteria of independence and perspective dependence) as suggested by Potts (2007). We propose a formal analysis in Gutzmann’s (2015) multidimensional logic, thereby arguing that emblems are instances of expressives in the visual modality of spoken language. We identify two classes emblems: i) THUMBS UP-type gestures, which function largely like interjections and express speaker attitudes independently of propositional content, and ii) CRAZY-type gestures, which resemble expressive adjectives (e.g., fucking in the fucking dog) and require an argument from the asserted content. These types seem to differ in their preferred patterns of gesture-speech alignment, felicity in indirect discourse, and their ability to occur as stand alone instances, i.e., without any co-occurring speech signal.

We model THUMBS UP-type gestures as isolated expletive use-conditional items (UCIs) and CRAZY-type gestures as functional expletive UCIs. Thus, both contribute purely use-conditional meaning. They differ, however, in how this content is integrated into the speech signal and from which perspective they are typically interpreted.

Talk by Karen De Clercq (LLF/Université Paris Cité/CNRS) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Karen De Clercq (LLF/Université Paris Cité/CNRS) (work with Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, KU Leuven) in the Semantics Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link. 

Date: May 8, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: *NEG-NEG: an argument against lexicalism from negation stacking

View abstract

Talk by Prarthanaa Bharadwaj (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Prarthanaa Bharadwaj (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link. 

Date: February 6, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Deconstructing Modal Necessity in Kannada

Abstract:
The study of modality in semantics has long focused on modal flavour (epistemic vs. root modality; Kratzer 1977, 1991) and modal force (possibility vs. necessity; Rullmann et al. 2008). More recent research has explored the previously understudied dimension of modal strength, particularly the distinction between weak and strong readings (Vander Klok and Hohaus 2020; Weingartz and Hohaus 2024). Languages employ diverse strategies to denote modal strength distinctions (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2008). Certain languages (English, German) mark this distinction lexically, while others employ morphological means, such as counterfactual constructions (Greek, French) or specialized derivational suffixes (Javanese). In some cases, this distinction remains unmarked (Afrikaans, Samoan). Kannada presents a novel case where strong necessity arises by exhaustifying over a necessity modal, a phenomenon that contrasts with existing literature, where exhaustification typically applies to possibility modals (Leffel 2012; Grubic and Mucha 2021).

Talk by Alexander Turtureanu (Berlin) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Alexander Turtureanu (Berlin) in the Semantics Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link. 

Date: January 30, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Homogeneity from an MRT perspective

Abstract:
I my PhD dissertation, I develop a psychologistic approach to natural language semantics (MRT), which opens up a novel perspective on some traditional semantic topics and problems. In this talk, I will introduce some basic notions of MRT and describe how they give rise to an understanding of homogeneity that differs structurally from conventional truth-conditional-semantic accounts of this phenomenon: Instead of rooting homogeneity in the “lexical semantics” of definite plurals, I derive its emergence from the more basic question of how different semantic contexts determine the way speakers interpret the application of predicates to sets of individuals.