- I am a professor of linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf. My work bridges several subdisciplines in linguistics, including language documentation, typology, formal semantics, morpho-syntax and corpus linguistics.
- Since a lot of people have been wondering about my name, here is a page with instructions for pronunciation.
- Supervision requests: I take on few PhD students, and only if they’re fully funded and their thesis contributes substantially to the documentation of less-described languages. If you don’t have a PhD position with me, you’ll need a project proposal for a scholarship application before I talk to you.
My handle on bluesky is @kilinguistics.
News
- False Beliefs
I was very happy to join a recent workshop on mistaken beliefs, organized by Simon Wimmer. I learned about intriguing new research by colleagues, and took the opportunity to present some ideas that relate contrafactivity to counterfactuality as expressed in natural languages. You can find my slides here. - Counterfactuality and mood
In my new paper, I take stock of cross-linguistically common functions and expressions of counterfactuality. It also includes a discussion about whether expressions such as should encode counterfactuality or some kind of “weak” necessity. You can download it here, or contact me. - Intro to morphology
I just published my intro to morphology (Einführung in die Morphologie, in German). It starts out from the idea of the morphological cycle, which suggests that languages move through stages of isolating, agglutinating and fusional morphology, and uses this idea to introduce basic concepts of morphology, including inflection, derivation, paradigms, and different types and degrees … Continue reading “Intro to morphology” - DGfS Workshop 2025With my colleagues Ingo Plag and Jessica Nieder, we’re organizing a workshop on Morphological Variation at the upcoming DGfS in Mainz. I’m looking forward to reading the submitted abstracts!