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.

 

In October 2025, the new DFG Collaborative Research Centre Common Ground (CRC 1718) starts at the University of Tübingen. We are delighted that the Institute of Linguistics will be participating with the project Multimodality, Iconicity, and Common Ground: On the Status of Spoken Language and Gesture. (PIs: Kathryn Barnes, Cornelia Ebert & Britta Stolterfoht).

 

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 Christopher Saure (Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Christopher Saure (Wuppertal) 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 5, 2026

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: The multiperspectival potential of indirect discourse 

Abstract: 
There is an overall consensus in the literature on perspectivization in language that indirect discourse (ID) does fundamentally not allow perspective shift of deictic expressions in its scope, which are thus obligatorily interpreted from the speaker’s context (e.g., Schlenker 2004). Consequently, research on perspective shift has been primarily focused on free indirect discourse (FID) for its seemingly unique display of multiperspectivity. 

In this talk, I provide theoretical and empirical evidence that this prevalent view of ID does not accurately capture its true perspectival potential. Specifically, I argue that ID allows for the same indexicals to shift to the perspective of the reported utterance’s or thought’s original author as FID, namely spatio-temporal adverbs. Crucially, my proposal entails that perspective shift in ID is only unlocked if certain conditions are fulfilled and that the misconceptions about ID stem from a lack of recognition of these conditions in previous works. I discuss three conditions I deem to be significant for facilitating perspective shift in ID – narrative context, discourse prominence and type of propositional attitude verb – and highlight how these factors are relevant for the interpretation of FID as well. Moreover, I present the results of two experimental studies which show that, by taking into account the aforementioned factors, we can (a) increase the acceptability of shifted ID readings; and (b) significantly affect the interpretation of temporal indexicals in German ID.

Finally, I propose that these findings necessitate a uniform treatment of ID and FID. I briefly discuss which of the popular approaches to explain FID’s multiperspectivity – a double-context account (e.g., Schlenker 2004, Eckardt 2014) or a mixed quotation analysis (Maier 2015) – provides the ideal framework for this task.

Talk by Marius Wecker (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Marius Wecker (Bochum) 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 29, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

The talk will be held in German. 

Title: (Diskurse)-Commitments als Elemente politischer Positionierung. Ein theoretischer Ansatz zur Verknüpfung von formaler Pragmatik und Diskursanalyse 

Abstract: 
Pragmatik und Diskursanalyse repräsentieren zwei unterschiedliche Paradigmen innerhalb der Linguistik, was sich maßgeblich aus ihren jeweiligen ideengeschichtlichen Verortungen erklären lässt. Während die Pragmatik in der angloamerikanischen Tradition der analytischen Philosophie verankert ist, weist die Diskursanalyse – insbesondere in ihrem Rückgriff auf Foucault – deutliche Bezüge zu kontinentalphilosophischen Denkströmungen auf. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, beide Ansätze systematisch miteinander zu verbinden, da davon ausgegangen wird, dass sich ihre unterschiedlichen theoretischen Perspektiven und methodischen Zugänge wechselseitig fruchtbar ergänzen. Zu diesem Zweck greife ich mit dem Table-Model (Farkas & Bruce 2010) und dem Begriff des Commitments (Geurts 2019; Krifka 2015) zwei formale Konzepte der Pragmatik auf und bringe sie in theoretischer Hinsicht mit dem diskursanalytischen Konzept der politischen Positionierung in Verbindung. Die zentrale Arbeitshypothese lautet dabei, dass sich mithilfe des Commitment-Begriffs zeigen lässt, dass Äußerungen in Talkshows im Kontext des Gender-Diskurses primär nicht auf ein Update des Common Grounds abzielen, sondern auf eine Positionierung im politischen Diskurs.

Talk by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Cécile Meier (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: December 18, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Adjectival Horn Scales Conzeptualized 

Abstract: 
Pairs of adjectives forming a Horn Scale like <smart, brilliant> are empirically quite well investigated with respect to whether they trigger scalar implicatures or not. The inference of a scalar implicature to the negation of the extreme adjective is rare and more readily derived if the extreme adjective is mentioned in the context (Doran et al. 2009). That mentioning is the not the only factor that governed the derivation of the implicature is until now under discussion. More recently, Hu et al. (2022) argued by investigating Language Models like GPT2 that the expectedness of the stronger alternative captures scalar implicature rates regardless whether the more informative alternative is mentioned in the context or not. They find that „conceptual expectedness“ (similarity-weighted surprisal) is more apt to capture the empirical psycholinguistic data than „string expectedness“ (raw surprisal). 

In this talk I propose a method of conceptualization for the pattern of pragmatic enrichment from degree semantics that allows for a fresh look on scalar diversity (Tiel et al. 2016) and across-scale and within-scale variation. Unmarked stems like smart in the Positive combine preferably with a silent universal degree quantifier — the positive operator (Seuren 1978, von Stechow 2009). I propose that unmarked adjectives in the positive are, in fact, force variable. High expectedness for a stronger adjective when using a weaker one may induce domain widening for the weaker one and universal weakening is possible (Rullmann et al. 2008). The weak adjective seems to be coerced into an existential reading. As part of a Horn Scale adjectival scale-mates must have the same restriction. Expecting a contrary or contradictory adjective does not have this widening effect: only in the existential reading smart is a Horn scale mate of brilliant. This research contributes also to the theory of alternatives. What counts as an alternative or a Horn Scale is not just a list of words. Rather underlying quantificational patterns (existentials and univerals) could play a key role in deriving scalar implicatures (Buccola et al. 2021).

Talk by Lisa Hofmann (Stuttgart) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Lisa Hofmann (Stuttgart) 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: December 11, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Negativity without negation: Counterfactual propositions and at-issueness

Abstract: 
This work addresses the question of what are the levels of representations involved in representing the discourse-effect of negation, by investigating the anaphoric polarity-sensitivity of negativity-tags. Anaphoric negativity­-tags (neg-­tags) occur naturally after negative clausal antecedents, but not affirmative ones (1). These include: (2a) English neither­-tags, (2b) ‘not even’ tags (Klima 1964), and (2c) factive uses of elliptical ‘why not’ interrogatives (Hofmann 2022; Anand et al. 2021).

(1) I think that the defense lawyer’s closing statement {didn’t make / # made} an impact in this case.
(2) a. Yeah, and neither did the testimonies.
     b. Yeah, not even on the public perception.
     c. Yeah, and the jury foreperson explained why not.

The presentation investigates neg-­tag licensing, presenting evidence for a discourse-­level view of negativity. While prior accounts link neg­-tags to clausal negation (sentential negativity hypothesis, e.g., Klima 1964), I build on recent proposals that neg-­tags are sensitive to counterfactual propositional content in a discourse-­level representation (discourse negativity hypothesis, Krifka 2013; Hofmann 2023). In two experiments, I present evidence that an utterance is “negative” in discourse, when It introduces a propositional discourse referent that is false according to speaker intuitions, and (at least relatively) at-issue. The findings support a generalization on the level of discourse, that goes beyond clausal representations and allows for pragmatic enrichment.

Talk by Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Ede Zimmermann (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: November 27, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Intensional type logic: standard translation and non-standard interpretation

Abstract: 
The compositional interpretation of natural language is often carried out indirectly, by translation into a suitable type logic. This talk concerns the formal properties of such languages. More specifically, it is about Montague’s intensional type logic (IL), which has long been known to be almost expressively equivalent with its two-sorted substratum (Ty2): Gallin’s standard translation from IL to Ty2 can be reversed so as to cover nearly all of the latter, excepting only terms that are themselves of non-intensional types or contain such parameters. However, the proof depended on the so-called standard interpretation of both languages, according to which abstraction and quantification range over full set-theoretic domains. The question of whether the result also holds for Gallin’s restricted, axiomatisable non-standard interpretation had been open until recently. It now appears that there is more than one correct answer.