Since July 2009, I am a member of the faculty of the Linguistics department at UPenn. Previously, I was a PhD student in Linguistics at UMass (degree expected 9/2009). Before coming to Amherst, I studied Linguistics and Philosophy at the Humboldt University and the Free University in Berlin. My main interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language. I am also very interested in psycholinguistic perspectives on theoretical issues in this area.
In my dissertation, I explored a morphological distinction in German definites, which seems to provide excellent testing grounds for a number of theoretical issues relating to definiteness in general, the semantics of donkey sentences, as well as domain restriction. The dissertation is available here.
Several years ago, I started doing experimental work on presuppositions , mainly looking at the German additive particle ‘auch’ (‘too’) (see Schwarz 2007). Ongoing work in my lab, partly in collaboration with Sonja Tiemann at the University of Tuebingen, extends this work to other presupposition triggers and methodologies. The first fruits of this labor hopefully will be posted here soon. In the meantime, feel free to contact me if you’d like to hear more about it.
Other projects of mine , past and present, include among others:
- Maximize Presupposition [joint work with Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito]
- Corpus Pragmatics / Sentiment Analysis [joint work with Chris Potts]
- intensional transitive verbs. By reviewing the different empirical motivations for the competing theoretical accounts and based on some new data, I argue that at least two types of intensional transitive verbs need to be distinguished [See my SALT 16 paper]. I am currently following up on this with an eye tracking study, which tests whether the theoretical differences I propose are reflected in processing.
- My Humboldt University master’s thesis ‘Focus Marking in Kikuyu’ looked at the interplay of syntax and information structure in Kikuyu, a Bantu language spoken in Kenya [See my contribution to a volume edited by Aboh, Hartmann, and Zimmermann].
