GIST - Generative Initiatives in Syntactic Theory

Anne Breitbarth

Contact information

Blandijnberg 2

(+32) 09 264 40 86

anne.breitbarth(at)ugent.be

 

Research interests

I am specialising in historical syntax and language change. For my PhD thesis (Universiteit van Tilburg, NL), I researched the character, rise and fall of the afinite construction (finite auxiliary ellipsis) in Early Modern German. From October 2005 to January 2006, I held a temporary post-doc position at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen working on the grammaticalisation of the clausal left periphery in early West-Germanic. From June 2006 to December 2009, I worked as a Research Associate on the AHRC funded project The development of negation in the languages of Europe at the University of Cambridge. One of my interests within that project was the development of negation in the history of Low German, and I built a corpus of negative clauses in Middle Low German chancery documents. My book summarising this research has now been published by OUP. Since moving to Ghent in January 2010, I have worked on the interaction between negation and modality (within the GIST project) and the development of the conditional use of modal verbs in West-Germanic (FWO grant #FWO12/PDO/014). On 1 October 2013, I took up a lectureship in Historical German Linguistics at Ghent University.

Since 2011, I have been part of a project group with Sheila Watts (Cambridge) and George Walkden (Manchester) working to build a digital Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG). The project has secured funding from the Newton Trust, the British Academy and will now be funded for four years by the Hercules foundation! 

I am a member of the new network project 'Morphosyntactic change through corpora in German and beyond' at the DAAD Research Hub for German Studies at Cambridge University (2016-2018).

Check out my UGent research profile.

Publications

Books

Journal articles

  • 2017. (with Mariya Koleva, Melissa Farasyn, Bart Desmet and Veronique Hoste). An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22(1): 108-141.
  • 2016. (with Melissa Farasyn). Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 138/4: 524-559.
  • 2016. (with Sara Delva and Torsten Leuschner). A (Very) Imperfect Sandwich: English should German sollte  and Dutch mocht /moest  as Grammaticalizing Markers of Conditionality. Journal of Germanic Linguistics.
  • 2014. (with  Liliane Haegeman). The distribution of preverbal en in (West) Flemish: syntactic and interpretive properties. Lingua 147: 69-86. Special Issue Jespersen revisited (eds. Charlotte Meisner, Elisabeth Stark & Harald Völker).
  • 2013. (with Karen De Clercq and Liliane Haegeman). The syntax of polarity emphasis. In Polarity emphasis: distribution and locus of licensing, Special Issue of Lingua 128, ed. by Anne Breitbarth, Karen De Clercq and Liliane Haegeman.
  • 2013. Indefinites, negation and Jespersen’s Cycle in the history of Low German, Diachronica 30.2.
  • 2011. Modality and negation in the history of Low German, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 30.2:131–167. DOI 10.1515/ZFSW.2011.007
  • 2009. A hybrid approach to Jespersen's Cycle in West Germanic, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 12.2:81-114. DOI 10.1007/s10828-009-9027-7
  • 2006. Pragmatic aspects of Early Modern German auxiliary drop. Leiden Papers in Linguistics 3.1, ed. by Noureddine Elouazizi, Frank Landsbergen, Michaela Poss & Martin Salzmann; 1-15.
  • 2005. Auxiliary drop as subordination marking. Linguistics in the Netherlands 22:37-47.
  • 2004. Auxiliary drop in Early Modern German. Linguistics in the Netherlands 21:36-46.
  • 2002. Dative Case, Morphological Decay, and Structural Deficiency. Linguistics in the Netherlands 19:25-35.

Book chapters

  • To appear. (with A. Jäger) History of negation in High and Low German. In: Clause structure and word order in the history of German , eds. G. Ferrarresi et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • 2017. Jespersen's Cycle = Minimize Structure + Feature Economy. In: Studies on negation : syntax, semantics, and variation, eds. K. Hartmann, E.-M. Remberger and S. Cruschina, 21-47. Vienna: Vienna University Press. (Wiener Arbeiten zur Linguistik vol. 3; http://wal.univie.ac.at/)
  • 2014. The development of conditional should in English. In: Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface, eds. C. Gianollo, A. Jäger and D. Penka. Berlin:  Mouton De Gruyter.
  • 2013. The development of negation in Low German and Dutch. In: The development of negation in the languages of Europe, Vol. I: Case studies, eds. D. Willis, C. Lucas and A. Breitbarth, 190-238. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • 2013 (with D. Willis and C. Lucas) . Comparing diachronies of negation. In: The development of negation in the languages of Europe, Vol. I: Case studies, eds. D. Willis, C. Lucas and A. Breitbarth, 1-50. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • 2013 (with C. Lucas and D. Willis) Incipient Jespersen's Cycle: the (non-)grammaticalization of new negative markers. In: Comparing Diachronies / Sprachwandelvergleich, eds. J. Fleischer and H. Simon, 143-164. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  • 2010. (with Liliane Haegeman) Continuity is change: The long tail of Jespersen's cycle in Flemish, In: Continuity and Change in Grammar, eds. Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis, 61–76. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • 2009. An asymmetric view on stage II of Jespersen's Cycle in the West Germanic languages, In: Historical Linguistics 2007: Selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 6-11 August 2007, eds. Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis and Etleva Vocaj, 61-71. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • 2005. Unbearably light verbs versus finite auxiliary drop. In: Organizing Grammar: Linguistic Studies in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, eds. Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Riny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinhenz and Jan Koster. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter; pp. 53-58.

Edited volumes

Reviews

  • 2009. Review of Nikolaeva, Irina (ed.), Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Journal of Linguistics 45:238-243. (DOI:10.1017/S0022226708005628)
  • 2011. Review of Dogaru, Dana Janetta, Rezipientenbezug und -wirksamkeit in der Syntax der Predigten des siebenbürgisch-sächsischen Pfarrers Damasus Dürr (ca. 1535–1585). Hildesheim: Olms. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (PBB), 133.1:138-141. (DOI: 10.1515/bgsl.2011.010)
  • 2012. Review of Sapp, Christopher D., The Verbal Complex in Subordinate Clauses from Medieval to Modern German. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Diachronica 29.3:377-384 (DOI 10.1075/dia.29.3.05bre).
  • 2013. Review of Jonas, Dianne, John Whitman and Andrew Garrett (eds.), Grammatical Change: Origins, Nature, Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (PBB) 135.2: 265-272.
  • 2014. Review of Schlachter, Eva, Syntax und Informationsstruktur im Althochdeutschen. Untersuchungen am Beispiel der Isidor-Gruppe. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Germanistische Mitteilungen 40.2: 94-98.

Presentations

Conference Papers

  • Mai 2016. (Anne Breitbarth, Melissa Farasyn & Mariya Koleva). Neue Methoden zur Erforschung des Mittelniederdeutschen: computergestützte Werkzeuge im CHLG. 129. Jahrestagung des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung. Stendal.
  • April 2016. (Anne Breitbarth, Melissa Farasyn, George Walkde & Sheila Watts). The Corpus of Historical Low German: A tagged and parsed corpus of historical Low German. Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change, University of Nottingham.
  • March 2016. (with George Walken). Making the best use of bad data: Analysing syntactic change in Middle Low German. Dealing with bad data in linguistic theory, Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam.
  • May 2015. (Melissa Farasyn & Anne Breitbarth). Null subjects in Middle Low German. DiGS 17, Reykjavík.
  • January 2015. Jespersen's Cycle = Minimize Structure + Feature Economy. New Directions in Negation and Polarity. Jerusalem Syntax and Semantics 2015. Language, Logic and Cognition Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • September 2014. Conditional sollte and should. CGSW 29, York.
  • July 2014. Exceptive negation in Middle Low German. DiGS 16, Budapest.
  • July 2014. The development of ‘conditional’ should in English. ICEHL 18, Leuven.
  • May 2014 (Anne Breitbarth & George Walkden). Die variable Geschwindigkeit von Jespersens Zyklus im Mittelniederdeutschen. Pfingsttagung des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung, Paderborn.
  • April 2014. Exceptive negation in Middle Low German. Poster at GLOW 37, Brussels.
  • January 2014 (George Walkden & Anne Breitbarth) Variation in the speed of Jespersen's Cycle in Middle Low German. Joint FGLS - SGL Meeting, Cambridge.
  • July 2012. The development of ‘conditional’ sollte in German. DiGS 14, CLUL, Lisbon.
  • January 2012. (with George Walkden and Sheila Watts) Building a corpus for Middle Low German: notes and queries. Forum for Germanic Language Studies (FGLS) 10, Sheffield.
  • September 2011. (with Liliane Haegeman) The distribution of preverbal en in (West) Flemish: syntactic and interpretive properties. GIST 4 workshop on Polarity Emphasis.
  • April 2011. The scope of modals and negation in the history of Low German. MOSS 2, Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
  • April 2011. (with Liliane Haegeman) En en is níet wat we dachten: A Flemish discourse particle. MOSS 2, Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
  • April 2011. (with George Walkden and Sheila Watts) A Corpus for Middle Low German. Workshop on New Methods in Historical Corpora, Manchester.
  • 2010. Indefinites, negation and Jespersen's cycle in the history of Low German.
    (a) CGSW 25, Universitetet i Tromsø (June)
    (b) DiGS 12, University of Cambridge (July)
  • 2010. The independence of Jespersen's Cycle and negative concord. A case study in Low German.
    (a) CGG 20, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barlecona (March)
    (b) GLOW 33, University of Wrocław (April)
  • September 2009. Indefinites and negation in the history of Low German, Annual meeting of the LAGB, University of Edinburgh.
  • 2008. Breitbarth, A., C. Lucas and D. Willis: Contact isn't special: Case studies from the development of negation.
    (a) GLOW workshop on language contact. University of Newcastle (March)
    (b) Annual meeting of the LAGB, University of Essex Colchester (September)
  • 2008. Breitbarth, A. and L. Haegeman: Not continuity, but change: stable stage II in Jespersen's cycle.
    (a) Conference on Continuity and Change in Grammar, Cambridge (March)
    (b) poster presentation at the XVIII Colóquio de Gramática Generativa, Lisbon (April)
    (c) Annual meeting of the LAGB, University of Essex Colchester (September)
  • 2008. Breitbarth, A., C. Lucas and D. Willis: Incipient Jespersen's Cycle: the (non-)grammaticalisation of new negative markers.
    (a) DGfS Bamberg 2008, AG 1 Sprachwandelvergleich / Comparing Diachronies, Bamberg (February)
    (b) Conference on Continuity and Change in Grammar, Cambridge (March)
  • January 2008. The role of dialect contact in slowing down Jespersen's cycle in Middle Low German. Transmission and Diffusion, Radbout Universiteit Nijmegen.
  • 2007. A hybrid approach to Jespersen's Cycle in West Germanic
    (a) 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Université du Québec à Montréal (August)
    (b) LAGB Annual Meeting, King's College London (September)
  • February 2006. Speculations about the left periphery in early West Germanic. TIN-dag, Utrecht University
  • January 2005. Auxiliary drop as subordination marking. TIN-dag, Utrecht University.
  • June 2004. The afinite construction in Early Modern German. DiGS VIII, Yale University.
  • February 2004. Auxiliary drop in Early Modern German. TIN-dag, Utrecht University.
  • December 2003. Auxiliary Ellipsis and the role of the T/C-System. ConSOLE XII, University of Patras/Greece.
  • 2002. Dative Case, Morphological Decay, and Structural Deficiency
    (b) International Conference The Architecture of Grammar, CIEFL Hyderabad/India (January)
    (a) TIN-dag, Utrecht University (February)
  • December 2001. (with Gautam Sengupta as first author) Genitive Subjects in Bangla. Presented by Gautam Sengupta at the International Symposium on Non-Nominative Subjects, Tokyo University.

Invited talks and Colloquia

  • September 2016. Medial verb placement in Middle Low German. Observations from the construction of the CHLG. Talk at the first workshop of the DAAD-Hub Morphosyntactic Change Through Corpora in German and Beyond.
  • May 2016. (with Melissa Farasyn) Interne und externe Syntax mittelniederdeutscher Relativsätze. Talk at Kolloquium der Forschergruppe Relativsätze, Uni Frankfurt/Main.
  • February 2016. Anmerkungen zur mittelniederdeutschen Syntax in Psalmen des (14. und) 15. Jahrhunderts. Workshop "Produktive Ästhetik der Psalmen im 15. Jahrhundert". Wolfenbüttel. (event cancelled by organiser)
  • December 2015. Null Subjects in Middle Low German/Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen. Talk at the LAK linguistics colloquium, Universität zu Köln. 
  • December 2014. Exceptive negation in Middle Low German. Talk at the Oberseminar des Instituts für kognitive Linguistik, Uni Frankfurt/Main.
  • May 2014. The variable speed of Jespersen's Cycle in Middle Low German. Workshop on Microvariation, Arezzo.
  • April 2013. The development of conditional should in English. Workshop on Syntactic Change and Information Structure in Germanic, Manchester University.
  • November 2012. The development of ‘conditional’ modal verbs in West Germanic. Linguistics Symposium, University of York.
  • January 2011. Indefinites, negation and Jespersen's cycle in the history of Low German. Syntax Lab, Leiden University.
  • November 2008. The development of negation in Low German. SyntaxLab, University of Cambridge.
  • March 2008. The role of dialect contact in slowing down Jespersen's cycle in Middle Low German. NORMS Workshop on Negation, University of Oslo.
  • March 2008. Breitbarth, A. and L. Haegeman: Not continuity, but change: stable stage II in Jespersen's cycle. NORMS Workshop on Negation, University of Oslo.
  • June 2007. Finite Auxiliarellipsen im Frühneuhochdeutschen. Workshop Satzstrukturen im Fühneuhochdeutschen (Early Modern German Syntax), Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken (Germany).
  • June 2007. A hybrid approach to Jespersen's Cycle in West Germanic. Universidade do Minho, Braga (Portugal).
  • 2006. About NegP
    (a) Linguistics Seminar, University College London (December)
    (b) Workshop Syntax in Autumn 2006, Tilburg University (October)
  • June 2005. Pragmatic aspects of Early Modern German auxiliary drop. LUCL Colloquium, Leiden University.
  • October 2004. Live fast, die young: The short life of the afinite construction in Early Modern German
    (a) CLS colloquium, Nijmegen University
    (b) Trans Seminar on Syntax and Semantics, Utrecht University
  • November 2001. Gautam Sengupta and Anne Breitbarth: Genitive Subjects in Bangla. Linguistics Staff Seminar, Tilburg University.

Advisees

Teaching

Ghent

2015-2016

  • Gotisch (MaHTL)
  • Duitse taalkunde: systeemlinguïstiek – bijzondere vraagstukken: Systemwandel (Ma)
  • Duitse Taalkunde II (Ba2)
  • lecture on "Sociolinguistic typology, language contact and the speed of syntactic change in Middle Low German" at the Pirenne Autumn School 2015 on Medieval Law/Medieval Germanic languages

2014-2015

  • Gotisch (MaHTL)
  • Historische Ontwikkeling van het Duits (Ma)
  • Duitse taalkunde: variatielinguïstiek – bijzondere vraagstukken: Taalverandering (Ma)
  • Duitse Taalkunde II (Ba2)
  • Duitse Taalkunde IV: Variatielinguïstiek (Ba3)
  • Language variation and Change – Contact induced language change (ManaMa, 4 weeks)
  • (with Prof. Torsten Leuschner): Duitse taalkunde III (Ba3), Seminarie Duitse Taalkunde (Ba3)

2013-2014

  • Gotisch (MaHTL)
  • Historische Ontwikkeling van het Duits (Ma)
  • Duitse taalkunde: variatielinguïstiek – bijzondere vraagstukken: Taalverandering (Ma)
  • Duitse Taalkunde II (Ba2)
  • Duitse Taalkunde IV: Variatielinguïstiek (Ba3)
  • (with Prof. Torsten Leuschner): Duitse taalkunde III (Ba3), Seminarie Duitse Taalkunde (Ba3)

2012-2013

  • (with Prof. Torsten Leuschner): Duitse taalkunde: systeemlinguïstiek – bijzondere vraagstukken: Indifferenzausdrücke (Master)
  • (with Daniela Dora): Tutorium Deutsch ist nicht gleich Deutsch – Sprachvariation im heutigen Deutsch
  • Duitse Taalkunde IV: Variatielinguïstiek (Ba3)
  • (with Prof. Torsten Leuschner) Seminarie Duitse Taalkunde

Cambridge

2008-2009

  • lecture Ge1 Structures and Varieties of German
  • tutorials ('supervisions') for Structures and Varieties of German (ca. 30 students, each receiving fortnightly supervisions in groups of two)

2007-2008

  • One session on Sprache der DDR (Language of the GDR) as part of the lecture Ge1  Structures and Varieties of German
  • Four (of eight) sessions of the MPhil Seminar Historical Linguistics on Long-term syntactic changes
  • One session of the MPhil seminar on Research Methods on Experimental Syntax (judgement elicitation, questionnaires, Magnitude Estimation, evaluation)
  • Two sessions of the Mphil seminar on Research Methods on Using electronic resources for linguistics research (e.g., corpora, concordance software etc.)
  • tutorials ('supervisions') for lecture Li7 Historical Linguistics

2006-2007

  • tutorials ('supervisions') for lecture Ge1 Structures and Varieties of German
  • tutorials ('supervisions') for lecture Li7 Historical Linguistics

Curriculum Vitae

(CV June 2017)