Timea Szarvas

News

• "Gisbert Fanselow’s contributions to syntactic theory" workshop proceedings paper on scrambling and parasitic gaps, pre-final version

About Me

I'm an aspiring linguist who gathers (experimental) evidence to test and develop theories of grammar. My goal is to understand the abstract rules that human language is based on, how these rules systematically interact and how much or little they differ across the languages of the world.

I'm currently 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. 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, methods in experimental morphosyntax and statistical modeling. I also enjoy working with understudied languages and have a soft spot for the Uralic language family.

Curriculum Vitae

Click here to download my complete CV.

Output

To appear/upcoming

• Unscrambling German parasitic gaps. To appear in: Proceedings of “Gisbert Fanselow’s contributions to syntactic theory”, Linguistische Arbeitsberichte (LAB) 96, University of Leipzig.

2024

• Find the gap: Diagnosing syntactic structure in ATB and RNR constructions. Talk at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 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

• Case and Agreement Patterns in Turkish Nonsubject Relative Clauses. An Experimental Approach. Master's thesis, University of Potsdam. 

2020

• Challenges for Theories of (Post-) Syntactic Head Movement: Tense and Modality in Hungarian. Poster at SinFonIJA 13, Budapest. (with Johannes Rothert)

Contact

Online

timea dot szarvas at uni-potsdam dot de

Offline

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

How to pronounce my name