Hi! Here's what I've been up to recently.

About Me

I'm an aspiring linguist. My goal is to model the abstract rules that implicitly govern our ability to produce and understand language, i.e. the rules that we as native speakers have no explicit knowledge of. I am particularly interested in the complexity of these rules, how they interact, how robust they are across speakers and situations, and how much or little they differ across the languages of the world. I mostly study linguistic structures that are rarely used that we nevertheless seem to have pretty clear intuitions about.

Currently, I'm a doctoral candidate at the University of Potsdam. My dissertation project concerns the variability of sharing constructions, i.e. special types of filler-gap dependencies. I investigate if and where the displaced element reconstructs to find out more about the underlying syntax of ATB movement and parasitic gaps by running experiments. My supervisors are Doreen Georgi  and Malte Zimmermann. I'm also the PhD representative of the DFG-funded collaborative research centre on the Limits of Variability in Language and a member of the Potsdam Morphosyntax-Lab.

Beyond my doctoral project, I'm interested in the architecture of grammar, experimental methods and statistical modeling.

Teaching

Winter term 2024/2025: Experimental syntax (BS-LIN-028, in German)

Materials available upon request.

Curriculum Vitae

Click here to download my complete CV.

Contact

Online

timea dot szarvas at uni hyphen potsdam dot de

Offline

Linguistics Department, University of Potsdam
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24-25, House 14
14476 Potsdam

How to pronounce my name

  • [tʰime:a sarvaʃ]
  • [sɒrvɒʃ ti:mɛ​ɒ] if you're addressing me in Hungarian⁠⁠
  • Note that previous publications have the spelling "Sarvas" on them as I have only recently started using the spelling "Szarvas" consistently. Feel free to ask me how all of this came about if we cross paths in person!

    Please use the spelling "Szarvas" regardless of the original spelling of the publication.

Output

To appear/upcoming

  • PP modifiers do not reconstruct for principle C. Evidence from German wh- and ATB-movement. Poster at the 55th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 55), Yale University.
  • Unscrambling German parasitic gaps. In A. Alexiadou, D. Georgi, F. Heck, G. Müller & F. Schäfer (eds.): Gisbert Fanselow’s Contributions to Syntactic Theory. Universität Leipzig, Institut für Linguistik, pp. 99–110.

2024

  • Find the gap: Diagnosing syntactic structure in ATB and RNR constructions. Talk at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 60), University of Chicago, April 26-28 2024. Joint work with Doreen Georgi, Andrew Murphy and Johannes Rothert.
  • Experimenting with principle C in German ATB movement. Poster at Linguistic Evidence 2024, University of Potsdam, February 22-23 2024.
  • On reconstruction in German ATB movement and the optimization of experimental designs. Talk at the 32nd Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE 32), Queen Mary University of London.

2023

  • On the markedness of number features in embedded free relative questions in Akan. Poster at The 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 54), University of Connecticut. Joint work with Nadine Bade, Abigail Bimpeh & Jeanne Lecavelier.
  • Unscrambling German parasitic gaps. Poster at the Workshop on Gisbert Fanselow's Contributions to Syntactic Theory, Humboldt University Berlin.

2022

  • Scope ambiguities among suffixes in Hungarian: mood and modality at LF. In: Holtz, A., Kovač, I. & Puggaard-Rode, R. (eds): Proceedings of the 30th Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe, p. 102–124. Leiden Centre of Linguistics.
  • All that glitters is not syntax. On the deceptive comfort of the armchair. Talk presented at LMBB 9, Potsdam.
  • Scope Ambiguities among Suffixes in Hungarian: Mood and Modality. Talk presented at ConSOLE 30, Nantes.

2021

2020