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

I submitted my thesis and you can read it here!

About me

My work combines experimental methods with theoretical reasoning: I study core syntactic phenomena using judgment experiments. That is, I ask people to judge utterances that they rarely use but nevertheless seem to have pretty clear intuitions about. 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 am especially interested in how syntax interacts with other grammar components as well as with general cognitive constraints. Much of my work revolves around what acceptability judgments reveal about the underlying grammaticality of structures (and likewise, what they do not). In my dissertation, I studied how reliably coreference maps to principle C reconstruction in simple and multi-gap dependencies, finding that previous data reports based on introspection were conflicting due to the involvement of non-syntactic biases.

Currently, I am a researcher at the University of Potsdam. I am a member of the Collaborative Research Center 1287 on the Limits of Linguistic Variability and of the Potsdam Morphosyntax-Lab.

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

Output

Theses

• 2025. Rethinking principle C reconstruction in ATB and parasitic gaps: Data driven perspectives on the too many tools problem. PhD thesis, University of Potsdam.
• 2021. Case and Agreement Patterns in Turkish Nonsubject Relative Clauses. An Experimental Approach. Master's thesis, University of Potsdam. 

Journal articles

• Submitted. Reconstruction for variable binding in ATB movement. Interpretive possibilities and their theoretical implications. Joint work with A. Finholt, D. Georgi, A. Pregla, M. Privizentseva, M. Salzmann & S. Zompì.
• 2025. Why we're still debating principle C reconstruction. A comparative experimental study. In: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 10(1): 1-42. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.18707

Proceedings

• To appear. Diagnosing syntactic structure in ATB and RNR constructions: A reply to Larson (2013, 2014). In: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Joint work with Doreen Georgi, Andrew Murphy and Johannes Rothert.
• 2025. An asymmetry without theoretical consequences: Revisiting principle C reconstruction in ATB movement experimentally. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society. Vol. 2: 239-248. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA.
• 2024. On reconstruction in German ATB-movement and the optimization of experimental designs. In: Longo, F., Russo Cardona, L., Sgrizzi, T., Shahbazi, A. & Tamleh, Hadis (eds.): Proceedings of the 32nd Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe. p. 195-213. Leiden Centre of Linguistics.
• 2024. Unscrambling German parasitic gaps. In A. Alexiadou, D. Georgi, F. Heck, G. Müller & F. Schäfer (eds.): Gisbert Fanselow’s Contributions to Syntactic Theory. LAB 96, Universität Leipzig, Institut für Linguistik, pp. 133–144.
• 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.

Invited talks

• 2025. The limits of principle C reconstruction in multi-gap dependencies. Theoretical Linguistics Colloquium Vienna, University of Vienna, November 7 2025.
• 2025. Debunking the myth of principle C reconstruction in ATB and parasitic gaps. Linguistics Colloquium, Bielefeld University, June 11 2025.
• 2025. ATB = parasitic gaps? Considering inter-individual variability and the limits of principle C reconstruction. Syntax Workshop, University of Massachusetts Amherst, April 17 2025.

Conferences

• 2024. 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, October 17-18 2024.
• 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.
• 2024. Experimenting with principle C in German ATB movement. Poster at Linguistic Evidence 2024, University of Potsdam, February 22-23 2024.
• 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, January 17-19 2024.
• 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, June 12-14 2023. Joint work with Nadine Bade, Abigail Bimpeh & Jeanne Lecavelier.
• 2023. Unscrambling German parasitic gaps. Poster at the Workshop on Gisbert Fanselow's Contributions to Syntactic Theory, Humboldt University Berlin, April 27-28 2023.
• 2022. All that glitters is not syntax. On the deceptive comfort of the armchair. Talk presented at The 9th Linguistic Meetup Berlin-Brandenburg 9, University of Potsdam, September 29 2022.
• 2022. Scope Ambiguities among Suffixes in Hungarian: Mood and Modality. Talk presented at The 30th Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe, (ConSOLE 30), University of Nantes, January 25-27 2022.
• 2020. Challenges for Theories of (Post-) Syntactic Head Movement: Tense and Modality in Hungarian. Poster at the 13th conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 13), Hungarian Academy of Sciences, September 24-26 2020 (with Johannes Rothert).