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Cornelia Ebert



Professor of Linguistics/semantics, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:
2020–2024

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:
»Visual communication«

Project outline:
The project investigates, in an interdisciplinary context, the similarities and differences between visual and spoken communication, especially the complex interplay of the components of meaning in gestures and spoken language. In addition to gestures, which can enrich the informative components of spoken language in many different ways, there are also complex natural language systems - sign languages - that use the gestural-visual rather than the phonetic-auditory mode. The aim of the study is not only to reveal new insights into the nature of language, but also to come closer to answering the question of why gestures have been shown to play a prominent role in language acquisition and cognitive development. (Cornelia Ebert)

FKH video
Cornelia Ebert presents her research project »Visual communication« in a FKH video. The video was created during the lockdown to contain the corona pandemic in spring 2020. Please watch the video here.

Scholarly profile of Cornelia Ebert


Cornelia Ebert is a professor of linguistics/semantics at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2019. She received her Ph.D. in lingusitics at Potsdam University in 2006. Her thesis was titled »Quantificational topics. A scopal treatment of exceptional wide scope phenomena«. Following this she was a lecturer and a researcher at Osnabrück University, Stuttgart University and the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin. Since 2021 she carries out a British-German cooperative research project entitled »Interactions between Dynamic Effects and Alternative-Based Inferences in the Study of Meaning« (IDEALISM). And since 2022 she is one of the coordinators of the DFG Priority Programme 2329 Visual Communication. Theoretical, Empirical, and Applied Perspectives (ViCom), an interdisciplinary programme that comprises 19 projects working on different aspects of the visual components of language and communication. In 2020-24 she is a Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.

Website:
Please find more information about Cornelia Ebert here.

Main areas of research:
Dimensions of meaning and multimodality, iconicity in language; information structure, topicality in particular; quantification, indefiniteness, and specificity

Selected publications:
  1. (with Christian Ebert and Robin Hörnig) »Demonstratives as dimension shifters«, in: Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 24, (forthcoming 2020). [https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/DQzZTJlZ/ebert-ebert-hoernig_demonstratives_as_dimension_shifters.pdf]
  2. »A comparison of sign language with speech plus gesture: Commentary on Philippe Schlenker’s Target article ›Visible Meaning: Sign Language and the Foundations of Semantics‹«, in: Theoretical Linguistics, Vol. 44:3-4, pp.239–249, 2018. [https://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~coebert/papers/CE-TLcommentary.pdf]
  3. »Quantificational Topics: A Scopal Treatment of Exceptional Wide Scope Phenomena«, in: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 86, Springer Netherlands, 2009. [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2303-2]

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