CRC 1646

A03: The creative listener. Interpretation at the interface of prosody, syntax and information structure

A03 is concerned with the creative interpretation of utterances where the information structure and/or prosody of an utterance do not match a given context. The main question is how and under what circumstances such mismatches are taken to be meaningful, such that they give rise to creative enrichment of meaning by the listeners based on formal markings of focus (prosodic or syntactic). A03 concentrates on creative meaning adjustments and inferences based on implicit focus alternatives. We investigate four languages (German, English, Hungarian, Urdu), which differ in their formal markings of focus providing a cross-linguistic perspective on creative meaning enrichment.

News

Click here to see our talks and publications.

Events organized by A03

Invited talks

​29th April 2025 | an invited talk by Prof. Dr. Frank Kügler and Corinna Langer (Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main), "Production and perception of focus in Finno-Ugric languages" 

Workshops/Conferences

Conferences

9th-11th September 2026 | South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA) 40.

Workshops

27th-28th November 2025 | A03 workshop "Mismatches in Information Structure, Prosody, and Syntax: Challenges and Chances in the Data" 

24th July 2025 | Statistics workshop by Prof. Dr. Jutta Hartmann and Dr. Farhat Jabeen, "Acceptability rating tasks: scales and statistics"

30th June 2025 | Project-internal workshop with Dr. Anja Arnhold (University of Alberta, Canada)

4th-5th December 2024 | Project-internal workshop with Dr. Katalin Mády (HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Hungary)

18th July 2024 | Project-internal workshop with Prof. Dr. Balázs Surányi (HUN-REN Research Centre for Linguistics, Hungary)