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 Agata Renans (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Agata Renans (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: November 20, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Bare singular and plural kinds: Kind formation across languages

Abstract: 
Languages with a singular-plural and mass-count distinction as well as overt definite and indefinite determiners are predicted not to allow bare singular kinds (Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004). Ga (Kwa) is such a language (Campbell 2017; Renans 2016a,b, 2018, 2021) and yet both bare singular and plural count nouns can obtain a kind reading: while bare plural form is preferred for entities that are frequently encountered by the Ga speakers, bare singular form is preferred for rarely encountered entities. Moreover, definite NPs can never obtain the kind reading. Thus the Ga data point to a new mechanism of kind formation and to a previously unattested variation in kind formation across languages: while in languages like English the kind-forming operator makes use of the supremum (Chierchia 1998), in languages like Ga the kind-forming operator encodes a sum. 

Talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (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 13, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Non-normally modified descriptions and (non-)existence entailing predicates (joint work with Dolf Rami)

Abstract: 
Existence entailments are a recurring topic in philosophy of language. According to a widespread view, they arise due to the truthful use of the so-called “existential quantifier” (going back to W.V.O. Quine’s slogan “to be is to be the value of a bound variable”). This talk presents our alternative to this view that focuses on the position variables occupy in the logical form of sentences. It argues that the presence of (non-)existence entailments depends on the type of argument position that the (more correctly:) “particular quantifier” binds  into. After a brief sketch of the general architecture of the theory, we present linguistic evidence in favor of our rough three-way distinction among types of argument slots (“existence entailing”, “nonexistence entailing”, “neutral”) of predicates and a distinction between two types of modifiers (“normal” vs. “non-normal”). It relies on the analysis of DPs that host a modified head noun and observations concerning the scope of the operator the modifier is built from. Finally, we develop a formal semantic framework that is able to model the phenomena described.

Talk by Bartosz Więckowski (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Bartosz Więckowski (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 6, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Some reflections on double negatives and un-Adj antonyms

Abstract: 
Our understanding of the logical behaviour of double negatives like ‘not unhappy’  depends on our understanding of antonymic pairs like ‘happy’/’unhappy’. In the literature, their members are either construed as contraries  (e.g., Horn 2017) or contradictories (e.g., Krifka 2007). In my talk, I shall suggest, building on previous work on subatomic negation  and negative predication, how, on both ways of understanding un-Adj antonyms, the logic and semantics of double negatives can be approached from a proof-theoretic perspective.

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: October 30, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Word-level TAM: the case of German Adjectives ending on „-lich“

Abstract: 
I am going to present onging work from Project A02, a part of CRC 1629 NegLab. In the literature, there are different types of classifications mentioned for adjectives ending on „-lich“ in German. They differ in voice (active/passive), in modal force (necessity/possibility) and wrt actuality entailments (Bhatt, Hacquard on „be able to”). I am going to argue that „-lich“ lexicalizes parts of the clausal spine (TAM). Top down: The difference in actuality entailments follows from the assumption of a temporal  habituality operator that heads all the other nodes (Paslawska/von Stechow). Modals are interpreted force variable (Rullmann et al.). And voice is related to a difference in point-of-view aspect (imperfective/perfective, Rapp). Affixal negation may intervene between the habitually operator and the modal meaning component. The theoretical account of structural enrichment below the word-level follows the LF architecture for times and events (Beck/von Stechow). Furthermore, two types of imperfectivity (point-of-view aspect / genericity) are assumed.

This account contrasts Flury’s 1964 dictum that the adjectival “-lich”-derivations are structurally impoverished versions of „-bar“ derivations and it may shed new light on the difference between „-lich“ and „-bar“ derivations and translation puzzles: Compare „bestechlich“ (corruptable) vs. „bestechbar“ (corruptible).  

Talk by Camila Antônio Barros (Berlin) and Vinicius Macuch-Silva (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Camila Antônio Barros (Berlin) and Vinicius Macuch-Silva (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: October 23, 2025

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: Time commitment: ways gesture can be placed in time

Abstract: 
In this talk, we discuss different types of synchrony between gesture and speech, an issue that has been at the center of work on gesture-speech coordination. Based on McNeill (1992), we present an empirical investigation of how gesture and speech can be synchronized at the phonological, semantic, and pragmatic levels, drawing on a corpus study as well as on an experimental study. In the corpus study, we investigate the overlap between gesture and speech in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, looking at representationality and the synchrony of gesture relative to phonological anchors. The results show that the overlap between a word and a stroke is not a reliable metric to understand association when controlling for the investigated variables. In the experimental study, we test how a coarse overlap between gesture and speech impact the perception of speaker commitment in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. More specifically, we investigate how precision gestures modulate speaker commitment in contrastive utterances with different intonational contours. The results show an effect of gesture on the perception of speaker commitment, with diverging results for each language. Overall, we argue that gesture works in tandem with prosodic cues even in the absence of fine grained timing, impacting the understanding of gestural synchrony and its implications to alignment.