Plenary Speakers
- Jóhanna Barðdal (University of Ghent)
Jóhanna Barðdal is a Research Associate Professor at Ghent University, Belgium. She has her first degree from the University of Iceland and her Ph.D. from Lund University, Sweden.She has held visiting appointments at Manchester University, University of North Texas and University of California at Berkeley, and a Postdoctoral Research Position at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is the author of two monographs: Case in Icelandic: A Synchronic, Diachronic and Comparative Approach (2001) and Productivity: Evidence from Case and Argument Structure in Icelandic (2008). She is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Historical Linguistics and a founding series co-editor of Brill's Studies in Historical Linguistics. She has published in several linguistics journals, including Language, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Studies in Language, Functions of Language, Morphology, Lingua, Diachronica, Transactions of the Philological Society, Language Dynamics and Change, and Journal of Indo-European Studies. She is currently running a research project on the Emergence of Non-Canonical Case Marking in Indo-European, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2011–2015) and an ERC-funded research project on the Evolution of Case, Alignment and Argument Structure in Indo-European (2013–2018).
- Hans Sauer (University of München)
Hans Sauer is professor emeritus at the University of Munich (LMU). Currently he teaches as professor at the Wyzsza Szkola Zarzadzania Marketingowego i Jezykow Obcych w Katowicach (WSZMiJO, or Gallus) in Katowice as well as senior professor at the University of Würzburg. Another longstanding assignment is at the Masaryk University at Brno. Other previous posts and assignments include Eichstätt, Würzburg, Dresden, Innsbruck, Lodz, Palermo, Columbus/Ohio, Tokyo, Beijing (Peking), Chongqing, Kuala Lumpur. His research interests and publications include editions and studies of Medieval English texts, word-formation (especially compounding), glosses, glossaries and lexicography, plant names, Beowulf, especially Beowulf translations and Beowulf films, the history of linguistics and of English studies, varieties of English (e.g. advertising; pidgins and creoles), interjections, and binomials (twin formulae). He is a co-editor of MET (Middle English Texts) and of TUEPh (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Englischen Philologie) and he was a co-editor of Anglia and LexMA (Lexikon des Mittelalters).
- Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977. He has taught at the University of Arizona, Temple University, the University of California, Davis, and the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. He is currently on leave from the University at Buffalo and is the Professor of General Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. In 2006 he received the Research Award for Outstanding Scholars from Outside of Germany from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2008 he was awarded a Max Planck Fellowship from the Max Planck Society. His research is focused on theoretical linguistics, especially syntactic theory and theories of the acquisition of syntax and the role of syntactic theory in models of sentence processing. He is the primary developer of the theory of Role and Reference Grammar.