Headedness and/or grammatical anarchy?

Ulrike Freywald studied Music in Weimar, and German and Historical Linguistics as well as Public Relations and Communication Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, and in Vienna. While working at the University of Potsdam and in the Berlin-Potsdam Collaborative Research Centre on Information Structure, she did her doctorate in German Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. After her postdoc phase in Potsdam, where she also led a project in the Collaborative Research Centre on “Limits of Variability in Language“, she took up a professorship in German Linguistics with a Special Focus on Grammar and Didactics at the TU Dortmund.

Her main research areas are morphology and syntax of German where she studies non-canonical and often under-researched structures. Another topic is language variation and change, with a focus on different varieties of German, including multilingual environments. A more recent interest concerns the application of modern linguistic theorising in teacher training contexts.

Horst J. Simon studied German and English Literature and Linguistics in Passau, Amsterdam and Glasgow. He obtained his doctorate in German Linguistics at Humboldt University Berlin, where he also worked as a postdoc. He was a Feodor-Lynen-Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Vienna and (Senior) Lecturer in German and General Linguistics at King’s College London before taking up his current position as Professor of Historical Linguistics at Freie Universität Berlin. He has held various visiting posts, e.g. at Peking University.

His research interests range from historical grammar and pragmatics via theories of language change and variation to the history of ideas about language(s). He thinks a lot on methodological issues of linguistic research and on the diversity of the German language today. A particular interest lies in linguistic politeness.

Stefan Müller studied Computer Science, Computational Linguistics and Linguistics at the Humboldt University at Berlin and in Edinburgh. He worked at the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken and for the company Interice. He worked as acting chair for German and Computational Linguistics in Jena and for Theoretical Computational Linguistics in Potsdam. He had an assistant professorship in Bremen for theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics, a full professorship for German and General Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin and is now professor for German language with specialization in syntax at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

His main re­search topic is Ger­man gram­mar. He works both em­pir­i­cal­ly and the­o­ret­i­cal­ly. Top­ics of in­ter­est are mor­phol­o­gy, syn­tax, se­man­tics, and in­for­ma­tion struc­ture. He pub­lished main­ly about Ger­man, but he also works on other lan­guages as for in­stance Man­darin Chi­nese, Dan­ish, Maltese, and Per­sian. The the­o­ret­i­cal work is car­ried out in the framework of Head-​Driv­en Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar (HPSG) and the theoret­i­cal anal­y­ses are im­ple­ment­ed in com­put­er-​pro­cess­able gram­mar fragments. The gram­mar frag­ments that are implemented in the CoreGram Project use a com­mon core. One goal of his re­search is to un­der­stand lan­guage and to find out what lan­guages in gen­er­al and cer­tain lan­guage class­es in par­tic­u­lar have in com­mon.