NEWS
To me, there is not much that is more exciting than ideas. I feel so fortunate to be able to get inspired by ideas and to pursue my own. No matter how crazy they might appear at first.
Here, you will find what interests me at the moment, new ideas, new areas of exploration, as well as recent papers and talks.
(Though bear with me as I am updating)
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales. (Marie Curie)
You will also find some news on my blog.
New paper out in Glossa
Johannes Heim and I have a new paper out in Glossa:
Heim, J. & Wiltschko, M., (2025) “Rethinking structural growth: Insights from the acquisition of interactional language”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.16396
The main argument is simple. If we include interactional language in our theories, we have to conclude that trees do not grow upwards, they grow inwards. And this is what this paper proposes, setting out a new research agenda for first language acquisition (and including a corpus study on the acquisition of sentence final "huh?"
Randolph Quirk fellowship in London
I was honoured to serve as the 2025 Randolph Quirk fellow at Queen Mary University, London (May 19-22, 2025).
I gave a series of 3 workshops and 1 public lecture all on the general them of "What do humans know when they use language?" I addressed this question from various different angles, including First Language acquisition, Self-talk, the expression of emotions, and the role of our knowledge of language in our Interactions with AI.
Here is the abstract. The slides of all lectures can be found here.
CHAMP Summer school
The CHAMP initiative is hosting a free online mini-summer school. Its focus will be to train students on the current state of research on the syntax of discourse and to encourage them to explore new and unexplored languages for discourse-related expressions. The summer school is open to participants at all stages of their careers. Lectures will be held by Rajesh Bhatt, Pritha Chandra, Roberta D'Alessandro, Shigeru Miyagawa, and Martina Wiltschko.
Registration ends May 14.
CHAMP 3 @ UPF
We hosted CHAMP 3 (Charting Honorific and Addressee Morphosyntactic Processes... to create a window into the syntax-pragmatics interface) at UPF.
The purpose of CHAMP 3 is to bring together researchers with different backgrounds (both in terms of sub-discipline and theoretical stance) to engage in a dialogue regarding the empirical landscape of addressee-sensitive phenomena as well as their implications for our understanding of the division of labour of morpho-syntax and pragmatics. We aim to create an inclusive, stimulating, and constructive atmosphere where ideas can be discussed from a variety of perspectives. To this end, the final afternoon will be dedicated to a round-table discussion.
It took place on Friday and Saturday March 28/29 in fully hybrid formal with a mix of in-person and online talks.
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