The team

Prof. Dr. Barbara Job

Barbara Job is head of the research group "Romance linguistics". She did her PhD on the development of graphic design in Latin and early Romance texts and her habilitation on the differentiation of text types in medieval France in projects of the Freiburg Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 321 "Transitions and areas of tension between orality and writing". Research stays have taken her to Paris, Toulouse, London, Oxford and Cambridge, and she has held visiting and temporary professorships at the universities of Tübingen, Regensburg and the Humboldt University Berlin.

Her focus of research in the domain of Romance linguistics is on diachronic corpus linguistics (Late Latin and Early Romance up to the early modern period), variety and media linguistics (discourse traditions in the colonial period, contact between oral and written cultural discourse traditions in the European Middle Ages and in the colonisation of the Americas; linguistic standardisation and expansion processes in the new media; identity negotiation and concepts of temporality in blogs by migrants) and conversational linguistics (research on discourse markers and the co-construction of utterances in conversation).

She is also the head of the research group Language and Communication.

Dr. Désirée Kleineberg

Désirée Kleineberg joined the research group at Bielefeld University in 2021 after completing her studies at Ruhr University Bochum and her Phd studies at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. Her research so far has focused on the nominal expression of collectivity in Romance languages, examining in particular object mass nouns at the interface between syntax and semantics.

In her current habilitation project, she analyses "failed" constructions, i.e. verbal periphrases in Western Romance languages that have become uncommon or have even disappeared. From a historical-comparative and sociolinguistic perspective, she is interested in the reasons and contextual conditions for successful or failed grammaticalisation paths.

From a usage-based approach, her research draws primarily on a broad base of empirical data and always takes comparative account of the heterogeneity of Romance varieties in diachrony as well as in the synchrony of contemporary varieties.

Dr. Janina Reinhardt

Janina Reinhardt studied English, French and Spanish at the University of Konstanz and completed her doctorate on morphosyntactic and intonational variation in French interrogative sentences. She completed her teacher training at the Thomas-Strittmatter-Gymnasium in St. Georgen in the Black Forest and has now been employed at Bielefeld University as a university lecturer since October 2019, where she is responsible in particular for the didactics of Romance foreign languages. Accordingly, her current research interests lie primarily in the didactics of French and Spanish, with a focus on interfaces with media didactics (e.g. the use of AI to promote writing competence) and variation linguistics (e.g. the use of podcasts for the language-reflexive development of text types). Her habilitation project has the working title "Sprach(en)bewusstheit 2.0: digitalised language awareness" (for an explanation of the concept, see the PfLB article on the topic).

Dr. Valeriano Bellosta of Colbe

Valeriano Bellosta von Colbe completed his studies in Romance Philology, Medieval and Modern History and Ibero-American History at the University of Cologne and wrote his doctoral thesis on word order in Spanish. Research stays took him to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. After a period as a lecturer in Spanish and research assistant at the University of Cologne, he has been working as a departmental teaching staff member at Bielefeld University since 2008, where he is one of the programme directors and is responsible for teaching in the field of Romance linguistics. His interests have so far been in the field of (historical) syntax and semantics (grammaticalisation, collocations, TAM expressions, semantic roles, word order); recently he has been working on the didactics of linguistics in universities and looking for connections between linguistics and cultural studies (discourses on virtues, relationship between meaning change and cultural change, role of language and literature in educational processes primarily in the Middle Ages and Renaissance).