Are you interested in carrying out a doctorate at our institute?
We offer doctoral positions usually as part of a research project (with third party funding) or as part of the Research Training Group Interaction of grammatical building blocks (IGRA). We advertise open doctoral positions on Linguist List.
If you are interested in pursuing a doctorate at our institute, please contact the professor(s) of our institute whose expertise matches your intended thesis topic. Please attach a CV and a short sketch of your intended thesis topic to your email. Please also justify your enquiry for supervision. Your research topic should relate to the research activities of our institute.
We offer a structured doctorate programme as part of the Research Training Group Interaction of grammatical building blocks. Doctoral students whose topic relates to the research agenda of the Research Training Group (RTG) may be associated with the RTG. The courses include topics such as academic skills, linguistic methods and courses in phonological, morphological and syntactic theory.
Completed doctoral theses
| Year | Name | Topic of thesis |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Berger, Mike | Complex transitivity restrictions in grammar |
| Privizentseva, Mariia | Inverse case attraction in Moksha Mordvin relative clauses and the nature of Merge | |
| 2022 | Amato, Irene | Auxiliary Selection in Italo-Romance: A Nested Agree Approach |
| Popp, Marie-Luise | Morphotactics in affix ordering: Typology and Theory | |
| Schwarzer, Marie-Luise | Determiner sharing in German: An argument for movement-based approaches to ellipsis | |
| Tebay, Sören Eggert | Interacting (with) Morpheme Structure Constraints: Representational solutions to Richness of the Base Problems in Optimality Theory |
| Year | Name | Topic of thesis |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Driemel, Imke | Pseudo-noun incorporation across languages |
| Gjersøe, Siri Moen | Tonal Interactions in Nuer Nominal Inflection | |
| Meyase, Savio Megolhuto | Tone Polarity, Tone Features, and Tonal Representation in the Four-level Tone System of Tenyidie | |
| 2019 | Kushnir, Yuriy | Prosodic Patterns in Lithuanian Morphology |
| Murugesan, Gurujegan | Predicting the Anaphor Agreement Effect and its Violations | |
| Nformi Awasom, Jude | Constraint interaction in Grassfields Bantu tone paradigms | |
| 2018 | Barnickel, Katja | Deriving asymmetric coordination in German: A non-monotonic approach |
| Becker, Laura | Articles in the world's languages | |
| Hein, Johannes | Verbal fronting: Typology and theory | |
| Paschen, Ludger | The interaction of reduplication and segmental mutation: A phonological account | |
| Zaleska, Joanna | Coalescence without coalescence | |
| 2017 | Guzmán Naranjo, Matías | Analogy in formal grammar |
| Himmelreich, Anke | Case matching effects in free relatives and parasitic gaps: A study on the properties of Agree | |
| Klein, Timo | Patterns of resumption – Towards a derivational account | |
| Korsah, Sampson | Issues in Kwa syntax: Pronouns and clausal determiners | |
| Murphy, Andrew | Cumulativity in syntactic derivations | |
| Puškar, Zorica | Hybrid agreement: Modelling variation, hierarchy effects and Φ-feature mismatches | |
| 2016 | Baumann, Michael | Die Repräsentation von Argumentstrukturinformationen und ihre Rolle in der Satzproduktion |
| 2015 | Weisser, Philipp | Derived coordination: A Minimalist perspective on clause chains, converbs and asymmetric coordination |
| Year | Name | Topic of thesis |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Georgi, Doreen | Opaque interactions of Merge and Agree: On the nature and order of elementary operations |
| Zimmermann, Eva | A phonological account of morphological length | |
| 2012 | Goldammer, Thomas | Areal patterns in Ancient Western Eurasia |
| Opitz, Andreas | Feinstrukturelle Aspekte der Flexionsmorphologie in Grammatiktheorie und Psycholinguistik | |
| 2011 | Börjesson, Kristin | The notions of literal and non-literal meaning in Semantics and Pragmatics |
| Forker, Diana | A Grammar of Hinuq | |
| Handschuh, Corinna | A typology of marked-S languages | |
| Molochieva, Zarina | Tense, aspect, and mood in Chechen | |
| Reese, Johannes | Das Aktivpartizip im Marokkanischen | |
| Rießler, Michael | Typology and evolution of adjective attribution marking in the languages of northern Eurasia | |
| Wang, Luming | The influence of animacy and context on word order processing: Neurophysiological evidence from Mandarin Chinese | |
| Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena | Typological variation in grammatical relations | |
| Zschernitz, Susann | The role of prosody in the production and comprehension of PP-attachment ambiguities in German | |
| 2010 | Choudhary, Kamal Kumar | Mechanismen der inkrementellen Argumentinterpretation im Hindi |
| Irmer, Matthias | Bridging inferences in discourse interpretation | |
| Schließer, Johannes | Prosodic encoding of sentence Mode and focus in L2 |
| Year | Name | Topic of thesis |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Lahne, Antje | Where there is fire there is smoke. Local modelling of successive-cyclic movement |
| Salomo, Dorothé | The role of given and new information in young children's answers to wh-questions | |
| 2008 | Sudhoff, Stefan | Focus particles in German: Syntax, prosody, and information structure |
| Wolgemuth, Jan | A typology of verbal borrowings | |
| Chan, Angel Wing-Shan | The acquisition of the transitive construction: Methodological and cross-linguistic perspectives | |
| 2006 | Augurzky, Petra | Attaching relative clauses in German. The role of implicit and explicit prosodic principles in sentence processing |
| Bulk, Andreas | Form und Funktion pronominaler Klitika im Arabischen | |
| Schäfer, Martin | German adverbial adjectives: syntactic position and semantic interpretation | |
| 2005 | Fraczyk, Danuta | Abgrenzungsprobleme der Abtönungspartikeln im Rahmen der Mischklasse der Konnektoren im Deutschen und im Polnischen (am Beispiel von "aber" und dessen Äquivalenten im Polnischen) |
| Year | Name | Topic of thesis |
|---|---|---|
| 2004 | Stolterfoht, Britta | Processing word order variations and ellipses: The interplay of syntax and information structure during sentence comprehension |
| 2003 | Pappert, Steffen | Politische Sprachspiele in der DDR: Kommunikative Entdifferenzierungsprozesse und ihre Auswirkungen auf den öffentlichen Sprachgebrauch |
| Trautwein, Martin | The time window of language: The interaction between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge in the temporal interpretation of German and English texts | |
| Weskott, Thomas | Informationsstrukturierung als Verarbeitungsanweisung: die linke Peripherie deutscher Verbzweitsätze und ihre Interpretation im Kontext | |
| 2002 | Janewa, Valja | Generative syntaktische Beschreibung der Objektklitika im Bulgarischen |
| Muckel, Sandra | Wortstellungseffekte beim Satzverstehen: Zur Rolle syntaktischer, verbspezifischer und prosodischer Informationen | |
| Zybatow, Tatjana | Grammatische Determinatoren von Zeit- und Sachverhaltsverlauf im Deutschen |