Three questions for researchers at the department
Prof. Dr. Gianina Iordachioaia
How did you get into linguistics?
As a child, I wanted to become a teacher, so I went to a pedagogical high school to become a primary school teacher. So, around the 9th-10th grade, I heard about linguistics as a science from our Romanian teacher - about Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky. At school, I always liked grammar and math/logic, but not necessarily literature or other sciences. That's why linguistics seemed to be just the science for me. Then I knew right away that this would be my future. So I completed BA and MA studies at the University of Bucharest, then a PhD at the University of Tübingen and after various positions at the University of Stuttgart, University of Potsdam and Humboldt University of Berlin, I started working as a professor at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Graz in March 2024.
What do you find exciting about linguistics?
In grammar theory, the field in which I work, you try to find out which abstract principles underlie human language in general, so that they can be recognized in different forms in the most diverse idioms of the world. What I find most exciting about my work is that we linguists keep finding confirmation of this assumption of an underlying system of language, independent of individual language.
For example, linguists have long recognized that sentences are not processed and interpreted linearly, i.e. not in the order in which they are written or spoken, but in a hierarchical structure consisting of so-called constituents, which in turn have an internal hierarchical structure. Let's take the German sentence Die rote Blume liegt auf dem Tisch. If we were to interpret the sentence in the order in which it is written, we might try to interpret the first two words die and rote as a complex element die rote. But then we would not understand the sentence correctly, because it is actually the first three words that together form the constituent die rote Blume, in contrast to a sentence like Die rote liegt auf dem Tisch, where die rote is actually a constituent. In the same way, liegt auf is not interpreted as a constituent, because the verb and the preposition do not form a unit in this case either, although they stand next to each other (cf. Er legt auf). The preposition belongs together with the table and thus forms a constituent. In German, you can actually recognize non-verbal constituents very well, as they always take the position before the verb in the main clause: cf. [Auf dem Tisch] liegt die rote Blume vs. *[Dem Tisch] liegt die rote Blume [auf] vs. German is a V2 language, i.e. the verb comes second in the sentence and a full constituent always comes first.
Let's take a look into your future: what would you like to focus on in your research in the future?
The aim of my research is to determine the main patterns of meaning constitution in natural languages and to develop a unified theory of sentence structure and word formation. To this end, I am working on the morphology-syntax-semantics interface. Recently, I have done a lot of research on nominalizations, i.e. constructions that are adjectival or verbal in content but behave syntactically like nouns (e.g. schön - the beauty; spazieren - the walk). There are also so-called mixed nominalizations, which syntactically have both adjectival/verbal and nominal properties: e.g. the beauty of this thing is internally adjectival, because beauty can only be modified by adverbs (the [extreme/*extreme] beauty of this thing) in comparison to beauty, which can only be modified by adjectives, like lexical nouns: see the [extreme/*extreme] beauty of this thing. Externally, however, beauty is also nominal because it contains the article das, just like lexical nouns such as das Buch or das Auge. These observations are very important for a theory of grammar because they can provide us with information about the boundaries between grammatical categories in the language system.
To test my hypotheses in grammatical theory, I am also interested in psycholinguistic methods. I am currently preparing an experiment to investigate the differences in meaning of the various suffixes that appear in deverbal nominalizations in English: for example, for a verb like starve, which has two usages (see The conquerors starved the population and The population starved), can nominalizations with suffixes like -ing and -ation (see the starving of the population and the starvation of the population) also express both readings like the base verb? If the results for English look promising, I would like to conduct a similar experiment for other Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages in order to test my hypotheses in several languages.
Furthermore, I find second language acquisition very exciting and what the differences between first and second language acquisition can tell us about the human capacity for language learning. One topic that particularly interests me here is how the mother tongue influences the acquisition of a second language, e.g. how differences between different patterns of mother tongues affect the acquisition of the second language. I would also like to develop a research project on this in the future, which could contribute to and benefit from cooperation with other researchers at the GEWI faculty who are conducting research into multilingualism, migration and cultural transformation.
Assoc. Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Veronika Mattes
How did you get into linguistics?
Via a few detours. Even as a child, I was fascinated by people speaking different languages and when I was traveling, I always tried to find out something about the language of the country. However, when I decided to go to university, I was not yet aware of the subject of linguistics (at that time, it was actually not so easy to find out about study options without the internet). So I started with Romance and German studies at the University of Salzburg and quickly realized that I was most interested in linguistics. But I actually wanted to find out more about what constitutes the general language ability of humans, regardless of individual languages. I finally found out that there is a branch of science that deals with precisely this during a new (and only brief) study attempt in psychology, when the research of the "linguist" Susan Curtiss on language acquisition was the topic of a lecture on developmental psychology. That was the aha moment for me. I immediately enrolled at the University of Graz to study linguistics and was amazed at how diverse this small, rather unknown subject is. That's why I've stuck with it to this day.
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.