My PhD project lies in the field of Second Language Acquisition and contrastive analysis. I aim to investigate how Spanish-speaking adults acquire German constructions containing the pronoun "es" (i.e. "it"). The theoretical framework is Construction Grammar and the usage-based approach. The general ...

I am a doctoral student in general linguistics at the research training group GRK DFG 1624/1 "Frequency effects in language" under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Peter Auer. I am interested in natural human behavior, and particularly in natural, spontaneously spoken language and its neuronal ...

My project aims to investigate how native speakers of German perceive and judge erroneous utterances produced by advanced learners of German with a Russian background. Thereby, the focus will be on such factors as intelligibility and acceptability.
The essential research question is: Does the ...

One aspect that has often been drawn on to explain the differences between varieties of English is the influence of substrata. While it remains undisputed that substratal influence is a powerful explanatory factor, its limits are equally obvious. In a preliminary analysis, drawing on data from the ...

There are a number of German strong verbs which exhibit a stem vowel change from the infinitive -e- to -i- in the forms of the second and third person singular in the present tense and the imperative singular. This dissertation project is designed to investigate the replacement of the i-stem ...

Situated at the crossroads of second language acquisition research and the study of cross-linguistic influences, this project investigates the effect of frequent mother tongue (L1) constructions on the choice of parallel constructions in Italian as third language (L3) in Cameroon.
French ...

Frequency and salience - (how) do they interact with each other? The central goal of my project is to shed light on the so far rarely investigated role of frequency as an explanatory factor of perceptual salience (resp. non-salience) in dialect grammar. For that purpose, several non-standard ...

The linguistic and political situation in the autonomous community of Valencia contains a double conflict: a linguistic conflict based on the diglossic situation of Valencian and Castillian plus the rivalry of Valencian and Catalan which leads to an ideological conflict regarding the unity of the ...