Forthcoming: Handbook of clausal embedding

Anton Benz studied Mathematics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, where he also gained a doctorate in Philosophy. He worked briefly on a linguistic research project at Humboldt University before becoming Assistant Professor in Humanistic Information Science at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding. He then moved to the ZAS in Berlin, where he is now a senior researcher in semantics and pragmatics. His main research topic is the area of pragmatics. He works experimentally, computationally, and theoretically. He was one of the first to promote game theory as a framework for analysing the interaction of interlocutors in conversation. He published on Gricean pragmatics, including, for example, relevance implicatures, implicatures of optimal answers, and implicatures of complex sentences. Other areas of interest include knowledge updates in dialogue, the role of questions under discussion in discourse, and speech act theory. He uses a variety of methods in his research, including game-theoretic and probabilistic modelling, experiments, and computational testing.

His main research topic is the area of pragmatics. He works experimentally, computationally, and theoretically. He was one of the first to promote game theory as a framework for analysing the interaction of interlocutors in conversation. He published on Gricean pragmatics, including, for example, relevance implicatures, implicatures of optimal answers, and implicatures of complex sentences. Other areas of interest include knowledge updates in dialogue, the role of questions under discussion in discourse, and speech act theory. He uses a variety of methods in his research, including game-theoretic and probabilistic modelling, experiments, and computational testing.

Werner Frey was a research fellow at ZAS, Berlin (since 1999, till retirement in 2019). He received his academic education at the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen. His research has focused on the interface between syntax and the interpretative components with particular emphasis on word order, information structure and its marking, scope, indefinites and adverbials. Of particular relevance to this handbook is his work on the different degrees of integration of adverbial clauses and their correlations with interpretation, on the categorial status of various dependent clauses and on German comment
and reporting clauses.

Hans-Martin Gärtner studied Latin, German, and English at Frankfurt/M., held a dissertation grant from the Max-Planck-Society, and obtained a habilitation in general and Germanic linguistics from Humboldt-University, Berlin. He worked as assistant professor at the linguistics department of Potsdam University, as assistant director of the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, and as research advisor at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Currently, he is employed as research advisor at the Research Centre for Linguistics of the Hungarian Research Network. His research interests range from formal grammar and grammar formalisms to the description of German, Scandinavian, and Hungarian, with a particular focus on the grammar and pragmatics of sentence types and speech acts.

Manfred Krifka studied Theoretical Linguistics and Logic, Philosophy and Theory of Science at the University of Munich. After appointments at the universities of Konstanz and Tübingen, he joined the University of Texas at Austin for ten years before becoming full professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for General Linguistics, and director of ZAS. He has been fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Stanford and of the Institut of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and he has received the Meyer-Struckmann Price of the University of Düsseldorf for research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. After his retirement, he is Senior Fellow at ZAS. His research concentrated on semantics, pragmatics, and the syntax-semantics interface. His main research topics were the semantics of mass nouns and plurals and the interplay of their meaning with aspectual classes, kind reference and generic or habitual meaning, information structure, in particular the interpretation of focus as introducing alternatives and the semantics of questions, dynamic theories of meaning, in particular varieties of definiteness, and more recently the nature and modelling of speech acts, in the context of an ERC Advanced Grant project. He is also involved in linguistic field work and language documentation, in particular with the language Daakie in Ambrym, Vanuatu, which was partly funded by VolkswagenFoundation, and the creole language Bislama in Vanuatu, as part of the CRC “Register” at Humbold University.

Mathias Schenner is a software developer based in Austria with roots in linguistics and philosophy. He studied linguistics, philosophy and computer science in Salzburg, Amsterdam and Berlin. Between 2006 and 2013 he has been working as a researcher in several embedding-related projects at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin. His publications include articles on the syntax and semantics of embedded evidentials, adverbials and discourse particles. He co-edited a volume on reconstruction effects in relative clauses with Manfred Krifka in 2019. Currently his main interests in linguistics are formal discourse models and theories of sentence mood. Outside of linguistics, his favorite activities revolve around the analysis, design and implementation of programming languages, APIs and large-scale software solutions.

PD Dr. Marzena Żygis is a researcher at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin and a lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Linguistics in 1999 at Humboldt University. Subsequently, in 2007 she attained her postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) in General Linguistics: Phonetics and Phonology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 2000 she has been working in a series of projects at ZAS as well as in projects at the Technical University in Berlin, and the University of Barcelona. Her primary research focuses on investigating the segmental and prosodic aspects of linguistic representations, adopting a phonological and phonetic perspective. Her areas of interest extend to the study of facial expressions accompaning speech and the phonetic phenomena associated with non-native speech. Her research also encompasses the examination of how human communication is influenced and constrained by situative context. Her investigations delve into understanding how the contextual factors surrounding a communicative act shape and impact visual-acoustic interactions. By exploring this aspect, she aims to enhance the understanding of how language and communication function within real-world settings. Currently, she is a PI of two projects: “Audio-visual prosody of whispered and semi-whispered speech” [https://www.leibniz-zas.de/en/research/research-areas/laboratory-phonology/prosper] and “Grammatical tinnitus and its role in the perception of foreign language accent. A comparison of German and Polish”. Since 2020 she has also been an associate editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.