About Us

We are a group of young scientists interested in different fields of linguistics, mainly in semantics, pragmatics and syntax. We were given the amazing oportunity to explore our ideas in a professional environment and we are thereby able to contribute significantly to the scientific community. Edgar Onea, who leads our group, supervises us and provides support in our many interesting research projects.

Vesela Simeonova

I am a post-doc in the project “The erotetic and the aesthetic” where we investigate literary suspense from an experimental perspective at the crossroad between formal linguistics and literary theory. The project is joint between Uni Graz and Uni Goettingen (Germany). We are currently carrying out three experiments testing a novel methodology and theory of suspense that interprets experiences of suspense in terms of questions. Before joining this project, I was a post-doc in Igor Yanovich’s Emmy Noether project “Modal systems in historical Slavic languages” in Tuebingen, Germany, where I investigated the history of future tense and modality in Bulgarian. Before that, I did my PhD at Uni Ottawa, Canada on the syntax and semantics of evidentiality and logophoricity. I am interested in perspectival phenomena, grammaticalized expressions of emotion, and complex clauses. You can find my papers, handouts, and full CV here.

Lea Fricke

I am a research assistant at the German Department at the University of Graz. I am writing my dissertation is on variation in wh-phrases in embedded questions in German. From 2017 to 2021, I worked in the XPrag.de project “Exhaustiveness in embedded questions across languages”. Beside (embedded) questions my research interests include information structure, scalar implicatures, and experimental methodology. I enjoy working experimentally and with corpora. Find out more about my research and other activities here.

Maya Cortez Espinoza

I am a doctoral candidate at the linguistics department at Uni Graz. Also, I work as research assistent at the Department for German Studies. Currently, I am working in the Project „The Erotetic and the Aesthetic“, where we want to find out more about suspense in texts. In February of 2021, I graduated from the teachers training program. In my master thesis, I looked at the semantics of the German discourse particles “überhaupt” and “gar”. I am very interested in formal semantics and pragmatics as well as their interfaces with syntax.

Here is the link to my homepage.

Simon Dampfhofer

I am studying German and Philosophy at the Bachelor’s level as well as Physics at the Master’s level. Since 2018, I have been a student assistant at the Department of German Studies, where I am currently working on an experimental design to study the diachronous change of presuppositions. Further interests and topics I am working on include: formal linguistics, syntactical constraints on German evidentials, and philosophy of language.

Kathrin Hirsch

I am in the last year of my Bachelor’s degree in German Studies at the University of Graz. I am especially interested in 20th century literature, philosophy of language, and linguistics. In 2020/21 I received an Erasmus+ grant for an academic exchange at the University of Bonn. It allowed me to deepen my knowledge in literary studies and expand my knowledge on structuralism, theory of fiction, and aesthetics. It was a great way to complement my interest in text linguistics and discourse analysis. I am particularly interested in the interface between linguistics and literary studies, especially how semantic and pragmatic phenomena impact literary texts. Therefore, I am happy to participate in the project “The Erotetic and the Aesthetic” (jointly funded between the FWF in Austria and DFG in Germany), where we investigate suspense and erotetic structure of literary texts at a formal linguistic level. This has resulted in another project in cooperation with the city library of Graz, in which I am responsible for the communication between the city library and the research group as well as for the planning of the experimental design. Currently, under the supervision of Edgar Onea, I am writing my bachelor thesis, in which I investigate the different effects of implicit and explicit questions in the erotetic structure of a literary text from an experimental perspective

Lea-Sophie Kravanja

I am a student assistant at the University of Graz and I study German Language and Literature as well as Linguistics in my bachelor’s degree. I am currently working on a corpus-linguistic study that focuses on the use of the definite article with proper names. I am interested in a wide range of topics and have therefore yet to decide which ones I will focus on in my upcoming master’s degree. Due to working as a student assistent, I have discovered that I enjoy working with corpora and I also like to conduct experiments.

Michaela Leeb

I am currently enrolled in the Bachelor’s programme in Linguistics, German Studies and the Master’s programme in Technical Physics, as I have finished the Bachelor’s programme in Physics in 2021. At the Department of German Studies, I am working as a student assistant on a project that combines game theory and pragmatics. I am also engaged in another project that deals with variant grammar and the geographical evolution of language.

Melanie Loitzl

I am a student assistant at the university of Graz currently doing two bachelor’s degrees, namely one in teacher training with the subjects German and English and another one in German philology/German studies. At the moment, I am working on a corpus study together with Lea-Sophie and Prof. Onea where we investigate the use of definite articles with proper names in German. Additionally, I help conducting experiments for projects my other colleagues have, which I enjoy, too. As I am a student assistant, I am still discovering my topics of interest, but so far, I have noticed that I generally enjoy working on corpora and conducting experiments.