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.
2 new doctors
I have become the Doktor mutter of my first UPF doctoras. Felicitats!!!
Sara Amido defended her dissertation: You’re offended, I’m offended: A face-based analysis of confrontational conversation.
(this was co-supervised with my colleague Laia Mayol)
Despite its ordinariness in everyday interaction, confrontational conversation is rarely examined in the field of pragmatics, particularly in studies concerned with interactional phenomena. So far, there is no account of what specifically makes an exchange confrontational, as opposed to non-confrontational. This dissertation addresses that gap by investigating whether there are necessary and sufficient conditions for confrontational conversation and, if so, what they are. The study draws on notions from Conversation Analysis, speech act theory, as well as politeness theory, particularly the notion of face. The investigation is carried out through corpus analyses using data from reality TV, judgement tasks, and dialogue annotation. I analyse the two minimal turns in conversation separately, focusing on their locution and illocution. The findings lead me to propose that, in order to identify confrontational conversation, the two turns must be considered together, and that the distinction from non-confrontation lies in the perlocution of the turns. I argue that for conversation to be confrontational, each of the two turns must result in the perlocutionary effect of offence.
Clàudia Martínez Hernández defended her dissertation Partitive-en in Catalan is not a test for unaccusativity. Experimental evidence and theoretical consequences
(this was co-supervised with my colleague Alex Alsina)
This thesis investigates the partitive clitic en in Catalan and its reliability as a diagnostic of unaccusativity. While ne-cliticization has traditionally been associated with unaccusative syntax (Burzio, 1986; Belleti & Rizzi, 1981), evidence from three sets of experiments in Catalan challenge this view. A first set of experiments combining acceptability judgements and fill-in-the-blanks tasks prove that en can appear with both unaccusative and unergative verbs, undermining its role as a diagnostic. A second experiment examines the effect of a locative and reveals that, contrary to previous claims (Torrego, 1989; Todolí, 2002), it does not promote partitive cliticization but competes with it. A third experiment shows that the partitive is compatible with arguments of all animacy levels, challenging the alleged restriction of the partitive to low animacy arguments. Together, these empirical findings suggest that partitive cliticization in Catalan is shaped by a variety of factors: it can be licensed as the argument of intransitive verbs when there is a clearly accessible quantified or indefinite NP in postverbal position that it co-refers with and if there is no competition with another cliticizable constituent that can occupy a similar position. The results highlight the need for experimentally grounded syntactic research and call for rethinking the explanatory power of unaccusativity.
Rightsplaining reality. (A new post on Medium)
I've just published a new post on Medium . It´s a linguistic perspective on Trump's territoriality of truth. Using Kamio's theory of territory of information, I analyze the dissonance between reality and (certain) media reports. It makes me happy to be able to integrate my linguistic thoughts with my political views.
New paper on Demonstratives in NLLT
Valentina Colasanti and I have a new paper out in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (open access!)
Colasanti, V., Wiltschko, M. Demonstratives locate referents in common space and ground: A comparative syntactic approach. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-025-09675-3
The paper investigates a generalization that´s well known for English: demonstratives, which allow speakers to locate referents in space, can also be used to locate referents in the common ground. Specifically, the proximate demonstrative this can be used to introduce novel discourse referents, while the distal demonstrative that can be used to refer to familiar discourse referents. Valentina and I asked ourselves if this pattern is found in other languages and so we studied some 20 languages. The result was pretty clear: if a language reuses spatial demonstratives for grounding, it follows the same pattern.
We develop a syntactic analysis for this finding within the framework of the Interactional Spine Hypothesis.
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.
.