Research
My research is concerned with the architecture of language and its formal and computational
modelling (also on the basis of experimental results), with a special focus on
clitics, ambiguities, the exploration of the syntax-prosody interface, and phonology in general.
Funded projects:
- 2022. 2-year project together with George Walkden (University of Konstanz) on "Noise and Signal in West Germanic Medieval Manuscripts" as part of the research initiative "Meaningful Silence and Noise", funded by the AFF of the University of Konstanz. This project pursues the question whether traces of prosody are reflected in the scripts before 1100 by means of word separation, punctuation, accentuation and spaces. (PhD position).
- 2022. Financial support for a research assistant position from the Goethe (University) Research Academy for Early Career Researchers (GRADE), paid for by the Franz Adickes Stiftungsfonds. (2400 Euro).
- 2021. Joint 3-year DFG-AHRC project together with Alice Turk (University of Edinburgh) on "Prosodic structure at the interface between language and speech". Both language redundancy and prosodic structure affect characteristics of speech related to acoustic salience and intelligibility. The idea that prosodic structure is the interface between grammar and speech led to proposals that speakers plan the prosodic structure of an utterance in order to make less predictable parts of speech more intelligible via its effects on acoustic saliency. The goals of this project are 1) to test the hypothesis that prosodic structure is the interface between language and speech, and 2) to implement this interface in a (computational) LFG-grammar in order to test and evaluate our architectural assumptions. (PhD position on the German side).
- 2020. Research stipend for a project on Integrating prosodic structure into computational grammars, funded by the DFG (German research foundation). The aim of this project is to lay the foundation for the integration of prosodic structure into linguistically deep computational grammars in
order to facilitate future applications of automatic speech
understanding, i.e., real comprehension. (ca. 60000 Euro).
- 2017. Project on Clitics in the verbal complex in Iranian languages, funded by the AFF of the University of Konstanz. This project investigates the position of clitics within the verbal complex across Iranian languages, including studies of linear order and resulting conclusions about syntactic phrasing as well as stress distribution and phonological phenomena (ca. 8000 Euro).
- 2016. Project on The effect of frequencies on prosodic boundaries, funded by the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. By means of a production study, the project investigates frequency effects of syntactic constructions and individual word combinations on the 'strength' of prosodic boundaries (in cooperation with Alice Turk, Edinburgh University, ca. 2500 Euro).
Projects I have been involved in:
- I was a member of the Research Unit Questions at the Interfaces, funded by the DFG. Our project is concerned with Information Structure and Questions in Urdu/Hindi (P4, PI: Miriam Butt).
- I was also part of a project on discourse visualization of political discussions with a focus on deliberation: VisArgue, an interdisciplinary project with the aim to automatically extract linguistic cues for the determination of deliberation, and to visualize the findings (PIs: Miriam Butt, Katharina Holzinger, Daniel Keim).
- I was (and occassionally still am) involved in the development of a computationally robust Urdu
grammar with the XLE platfom, which was funded by the DFG (PI: Miriam Butt). This included work on a wide range of linguistic and computational topics (e.g., coordination, clitics (Ezafe) and problems of tense and aspect), with a special focus on finite state machines and the linguistic issues that
can be resolved via finite state technologies (e.g., a transducer allowing for Urdu script to be converted into ASCII and vice versa).
Thesis: The Syntax-Prosody Interface in Lexical-Functional Grammar
My thesis develops a representation of phonological structure and discusses its relation to syntax in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) from the perspective of production as well as comprehension. It approaches the relation between syntax and phonology/prosody from several perspectives by discussing different grammatical phenomena, which are problematic to the prosody-syntax interface. On the one hand, the thesis focusses on syntactic ambiguities (as they are, for example, resulting from the German case system), which are difficult to handle by an only-syntactic model, but can be resolved by taking prosodic cues into consideration.
On the other hand, the thesis also discusses several types of (endo-)clitics (in Swabian, Pashto, and Degema) because these clitics are typical border elements between the different modules and provide
interesting insights into the architecture of grammar. The resulting interface enables a modular integration of phonology/prosody into the LFG framework and
allows for a straightforward analysis of complex language phenomena like, for example, Pashto second position endoclisis.