What do you find exciting about your work?

Language is (almost) always and everywhere around us, spoken, written, signed, in the most diverse forms. We usually use language without giving it much thought, and yet we know exactly how to use and vary it in different situations, depending on who we are talking to, what we are talking about and why. Our entire linguistic knowledge, i.e. our vocabulary, grammatical rules and social conventions, is extremely extensive and detailed. However, as speakers, we are not aware of most of it. As a linguist, I find it very fascinating to find out the regularities and connections and to explore how people build up this knowledge - usually for several languages and dialects over the course of their lives.

The most exciting part of my linguistic work so far has undoubtedly been my research work on Bikol, one of the many and still relatively little-studied Filipino languages. To find out more about it, I spent some time doing field research in the Philippines, which was a great challenge and enrichment.

Let's take a look into your future: what would you like to focus on in your research in the future?

I have been working on the language development of children and young people for several years. It is by no means the case that language acquisition is complete after infancy, but we still don't know that much about the later development of the mother tongue. For my current research, I am particularly interested in how older children and young people learn complex word formations, i.e. words that are made up of several constituents and are abstract, such as incompatibility, democratization, identifiable, overuse. When and how do children learn to understand and use such difficult words, which occur much more frequently in written than in spoken language? I look at how written language acquisition affects general language knowledge and what influence other languages that are learned and used (mother tongues and foreign languages or even dialects) have on this later language development. To this end, we study written and spoken texts by schoolchildren, for example, but we also carry out experiments to find out what children, young people and adults know (consciously and unconsciously) about such complex words, i.e. what they mean and how they can be used.

What do you find exciting about your work?

From early on, I was captivated by the structures of spoken German, especially where language deviates from the supposedly "correct" standard. Think of subordinate clauses structured like main clauses, multiple elements appearing before the finite verb in main clauses, or finite sentences that are grammatically sound even without a subject. It gets really interesting because not everything considered "forbidden" in the written standard is automatically "acceptable" in spoken German. Linguistics doesn't just dismiss these phenomena as "deviations" or "bad German"; instead, we take them seriously and investigate them systematically. My doctoral research focused on these spoken language structures. It revealed just how much underlying grammar exists in seemingly spontaneous speech and highlighted the intricate connections between syntactic variation, semantics, and pragmatics. This experience had a profound and lasting impact on me – it's a fascination that has never let go.

Being able to learn and further develop the analytical methods myself only deepened my interest. I found ideal conditions for this at Goethe University of Frankfurt and the Leibniz Institute for German Language (IDS) in Mannheim. There, I had the opportunity to learn not only the theoretical foundations but also the practical "craft" of linguistics firsthand, especially how to systematically collect and analyze language data. I was also fortunate to contribute to the second volume of the "Handbook of German Connectors" (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren). This led to intensive work on the semantics and function of sentence connectors – an incredibly exciting and dynamic field of research in which I remain actively involved.

Looking ahead: What are your future research priorities?

Looking forward, I plan to continue to focus on authentic language data. I aim to more strongly connect my interests in spoken grammar and language variation with the topics of multilingualism and the interplay between language and society. I see great potential in bridging fundamental linguistic research with application-oriented approaches. For instance, what impact do technological advancements and societal changes have on the popularization of linguistic expertise? And how is linguistics redefining its role in this evolving landscape?

At the same time, teaching remains a high priority for me. I want to continue fostering methodological skills, integrate modern tools like corpora and AI-based applications, and empower students to conduct their own research. Linguistics needs a vibrant future, and I believe students should be actively involved in shaping it.

What do you find exciting about your work?

For me the greatest part of linguistic research is its ability to surprise. Semantics is especially fascinating because when you start with a puzzle to solve, you never know what it leads you to. I remember the amazing moment of surprise when I first read Greg Carlson’s (1977) thesis: He introduced a puzzle regarding the interpretation of noun phrases, but the solution was in the verb phrases! I was deeply impressed and decided this was what I wanted to do: to make surprising theoretical claims – of course based on solid linguistic data and valid arguments.

Looking ahead: What are your future research priorities?

Languages allow us to express the same idea in many ways. For example, you can ask "Do you mind me opening the window?" or "Do you mind my opening the window?". Some people claim that when you express things in different ways, the meaning is never entirely the same, so one thing semanticists do is to find out those subtle differences. One of the concepts we use is called referentiality: two similar phrases may appear in the same context, but one is referential – meaning that it refers to something or some idea – and the other is not referential. Linguists have different ideas about what referentiality is – whether it should be dealt with in syntax, semantics or pragmatics – and about what syntactic structures bring referentiality. I am studying the concept of referentiality in nominalizations, using corpus data and experiments.

What do you find exciting about linguistics?

I believe that one of the most miraculous features of natural language design is that speakers can understand perviously unseen words and coin novel words that have never been used before. This brings evidence that in the process of word comprehension and production, people operate on some sublexical elements, that is, chunks of word structure. How these chunks are recognised, interpreted, and arranged in the brain is one of the most intriguing questions of modern linguistics. Traditionally, it was assumed that sublexical elements, called morphemes, have independent cognitive status, that is, are stored alongside holistic words, have their own meanings, and can be combined with each other to produce new words. More recently, a new family of theories emerged that posit words, not morphemes, as basic units of lexical processing. Under this approach, sublexical elements are believed to be parsed out of individual lexemes due to human sensitivity to statistical regularities in the input data.

The morpheme-based approach provides an intuitive explanation for regular patterns of language structure, but many complex words are idiosyncratic. For example, in English, there are several hundred bound bases of Romance origin, most of which are semantically so obscure that it is hard to see how speakers can recognise and use them as independent units. The word-based approach seems to overcome many problems of the explicit representation of morphemes. It is strongly associated with creating full-fledged computational models that capture morphological effects through iterative whole-word processing. In the models, words can be encoded in several ways, from simple n-grams to units obtained through complex character-convolution algorithms. This approach, however, is not without its problems. Crucially, it remains unclear exactly what is represented in the mental lexicon and how speakers acquire chunks of certain sizes in the process of learning.

The project I will be working on in Graz implies creating a new computational model of morphology that is based on graph theory and is intended to elaborate the word-based approach. The model represents a network of morphological elements segmented out of individual words through distributional analysis which is driven by two general factors: formal similarity and co-occurrence frequency. Hence, when several related words include overlapping parts, these parts can be identified as sublexical units. In the model, a single learning mechanism is used to account for the emergence of morphological structure and the formation of complex words. It is based on a key concept of graph theory, the notion of shortest path, which refers to the task of finding optimal paths between two nodes in a network. Semantics is also represented in the model distributionally. I contend that just as word meanings are inherently context-determined, so are the meanings of those units of word structure that are singled out from words by the shortest path analysis.

Let's take a look into your future: what would you like to focus on in your research in the future?

My main research topics are morphological processing, lexical modelling, linguistic creativity, language acquisition, and language change. Specifically, I am interested in the internal structure, semantics, and distributional properties of words, in how they are created, stored, and processed in the brain. In my studies, I have always tried to combine computational and experimental approaches and test my hypotheses on several languages. More globally, I want my research to facilitate the computationally effective and theoretically rigorous study of language as a complex adaptive system. I am a fervent advocate of establishing closer ties between theoretical and computational linguistics that will benefit both sides. On the one hand, any linguistic theory is interested in a complete and sound formalisation of its theoretical framework. On the other hand, computational linguistics crucially depends on the insights and data of traditional linguistic theory to which to apply its mathematical methods. My main aspiration is, on the one hand, to promote greater information sharing between the domains of theoretical and computational linguistics, and on the other hand, to contribute to better collaboration of computational linguists and machine learning engineers to provide for more cognitively plausible AI systems and for better linguistic interpretability of their results.

What do you find exciting about linguistics?

I have a special love for the phonetic aspects of language. Listening to audio recordings several times to listen for phonetic realisations makes my heart beat faster and my "occupational disease" is that in conversations I sometimes pay more attention to how someone pronounces something than to the content.

I particularly enjoy working empirically and finding patterns in my work. I find it particularly interesting to combine different methods because they often shed light on different aspects of a phenomenon, which gives you a more holistic picture.

In general, I find it exciting to find out what possibilities there are in different languages, or in one and the same language, to express different things, and the nuances that come with these similar but different expressions. Every time you find out that another language or variety expresses something in a completely different way, or makes completely different distinctions (e.g. phonetically or in meaning) than your own, it breaks up your own patterns of thought and perception a little more.

Let's take a look into your future: what would you like to focus on in your research in the future?

As a linguist, I am particularly interested in the linguistic diversity of our world. However, while a few languages are very well described and linguistically analysed at very detailed levels, in many other languages very basic things are still insufficiently described linguistically or not described at all. I would therefore like to focus on less studied languages, especially their phonetics and phonology. An approach that also takes into account the variation of different dialects, registers and styles within a language is important to me.