The Lab Team
Prof. Dr. Aria Adli
Aria Adli specializes on grammatical variation. He investigates why speakers prefer certain grammatical forms (such as word order or pronouns) over others, considering both language-internal factors —like sentence syntax in its speech context and information structure— as well as language-external influences such as social stratification, lifestyle in the sense of Bourdieu, and register. His approach builds on language comparison (with emphasis on French, Spanish, Catalan, and Persian) and on cross-cultural analysis. His empirical methods include field work, corpus analysis, acceptability judgments, statistics, and computer simulations.
Amalia Canes Nápoles (PostDoc)
I work in the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface, which addresses (from various vantage points) questions of how communication works in context. My current work focuses on the discourse structuring and information packaging factors that condition the choice of certain discourse markers, and seek to provide clues to our understanding of the syntax-to-discourse relation. I have worked on topics such as report speech, polysemy of functional words and disambiguation through statistical methods.
Dr. Eric Engel
Based on the assumption that variation in language is not arbitrary, I am interested in information structural and sociolinguistic factors of variation and how they constrain the choice of a variant. My research focuses on phenomena related to the syntax-semantics interface, such as structural and interpretational properties of different types of subordinate clauses, the expression of negation, or zero elements in discourse.
Zahra Farokhnezhad (M.A.)
I am interested in syntactic variation and its interaction with social constraints. I try to investigate how the combination of different linguistic constraints and social factors lead speakers to chose among different choices in their speech. My current work is focused on studying register-related variations. I study post-verbal constituents to clarify their range of variation and to see how these variations are related to register. I also look into the language contact between minority and majority languages to understand how the speakers of the minority language I study are influenced by the dominant language of the country and how these influences are represented in different registers.