Historical Linguistics professorship

On this page, you will find information about the Historical Linguistics professorship held by Prof. Dr. Helmut Weiß at the Institute of Linguistics.

Team & office hours • Research • Teaching • News

Contact Room: IG 2.151 Tel.: 069-798- 32674 E-Mail: weiss AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Office hours in the winter semester 24/25: Wednesdays, 13-14h, Only by appointment at the secretary’s office or by e-mail to Anke Stakemann Secretary’s office Anke Stakemann Room: IG 2.152 Tel: 069 798 32673 E-Mail: stakemann AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de

Professor

Staff

Prof. Dr. Helmut Weiß

Melanie Hobich

Nelli Kerezova

Office hours:
Wednesdays, 13-14h

Office hours:
Mondays, 13-14h

Office hours:
by appointment by e-mail

Project staff

Farbod Khouzani

Dr. Carolin Reinert

Student assistants

Carolin von Rosenberg
(Student assistant
at the chair)

Manuel Lipstein
(Tutor)

Fromer staff

Dr. Thomas Strobel

Dr. Ewa Trutkowski

 Dr. Andreas Jäger

Scientific profile

The historical linguistics in Frankfurt deals with the history of the German language from the beginnings of written traditions until present times, i.e. the development of German in all its manifestations from Old High German (ca. 750-1050) to Middle High German (1050-1350) to Early New High German (1350-1650) to New High German (since 1650).

The core topic is the research and description of the principles and regularities of grammatical and structural language change, i.e. we are mainly interested in the changes in word forms (morphology) and changes in sentence structure (syntax) as well as the possible connections between them. But we also do research in more general questions such as the following: Why is there language change to begin with and how is it connected to other aspects (language acquisition, language use etc.)? This is a more theoretical issue which has the goal to explain language change and which is generally interesting for linguistic theory.

Another core topic of the historical linguistics in Frankfurt is the syntax of German dialects — a topic which is particularly interesting for language historians but also for general linguistics since most of the processes in language change happen in spoken language and it used to be the case that only dialects were spoken.

Current research

Negative adjectives in language change  (Projekt im SFB 1629 NegLaB, Leitung: Dr. Meier, Prof. Dr. Weiß)

A comparative approach to the mysteries of the Jespersen cycle (Projekt im SFB 1629 NegLaB, Leitung: Prof. Dr. Poletto, Prof. Dr. Weiß)