Semantics professorship

On this page, you will find information about the Semantics professorship held by Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ebert at the Institute of Linguistics.

Teaching • Team • Research • Semantics colloquium
 

 

Contact

Room: IG 4.314
Phone: 069/798 32394
E-Mail: ebert AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de

Office hours

On appointment. If you want to meet with Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ebert, please write her an email. 

Secretariat

Elke Höhe-Kupfer
Room: IG 4.313
Phone: 069/798 32392 
E-Mail: hoehe-kupfer AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de

 
We’re organizing Sinn und Bedeutung 30 (SuB30)!

The conference will take place at Goethe University Frankfurt from September 23–27, 2025.

👉 Click here for more information

Courses summer term 2025:

B.A. Linguistik 

M.A. Linguistics 

Team

Professor

Staff

Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ebert

Dr. Kathryn Barnes 

Dr. Kurt Erbach

Dr. Cécile Meier

Project staff

Dr. Janek Guerrini

Magnus Poppe

Dr. Carolin Reinert

Sebastian Walter

Eleonora Zani

 

    

 

Ph.D. students

Student assistants

 

Maximilian Berthold
Julien Foglietti

Prince Asiedu
Lennart Fritzsche 

Joana Gerheim
Deborah Elisa Jans

Scientific profile

The scientific focus of the professorship in semantics is on the meaning of language in the semantics-pragmatics interface with a special focus on semantic phenomena of visual communication, dimensions of meaning and multimodality, iconicity, information structure, quantification, and indefiniteness. Current research projects are concerned with phenomena of visual communication, especially with the contribution of gesture to the meaning of speech.

Research

  • DFG-project “Negation and Cancellation“, in the SFB 1629 – NegLaB: Negation in Language and Beyond (2024-2027)
  • DFG Priority Programme “Visual Communication” (2022-2028)
  • DFG-project “Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language” in the Priority Programme 2329 – ViCom: Theoretical, empirical, and applied perspectives (2022-2025)
  • AHRC-DFG research grant “Interactions between dynamic effects and alternative-based inferences” (2021-2024)
  • DFG-project “The Pragmatic Status of Iconic Meaning in Spoken Communication: Gestures, Ideophones, Prosodic Modulations”, in the Priority Programme 1727 – XPrag.de: New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental Evidence (2017-2021)
  • VokSi: App-based vocabulary learning: combination effects of prior knowledge activating and gesture-based learning strategies, Initial funding by IDeA: collaboration of the Department of Linguistics/Semantics, GU Frankfurt with the DIPF, Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation, Frankfurt (2019-2021)