Subfields: generative syntax, formal pragmatics, prosody, LM-ology, distributed morphology, dialectology, rhetorical analysis

Methods: Acceptability judgment experiments, prosodic production and perception studies, crowdsourcing, Bayesian and frequentist statistical modelling, corpus development and analysis

Phenomena: adjunct islands, amalgamation, appositives, as-parentheticals, clarification requests, comment/report clauses, echo questions, ellipsis (clausal and verbal), extraposition, factivity, fragmentary responses, information-structure (focus and topics), interjection, intonational contours, null objects of prepositions (across English dialects), pied-piping, (biased) polar questions and replies, quiz-show questions, quotation, reference resolution, relativisation, split utterances, strategic and non-cooperative discourse, syntax-prosody mapping

Languages: English (varieties), German, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Quechua, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, …

Reprise questions and fragments. Prof. James Griffiths is the Principal Investigator of project B5 of CRC 1718 Common Ground (2025-2029). This project undertakes a crosslinguistic comparative investigation of the interaction between the morphosyntactic form, intonation, and use-conditional meanings of reprise questions and related non-canonical questions. The project employs a mixture of large-scale acceptability judgment experiments and prosodic production and perception studies. This project also involves Dr. Timo Buchholz (postdoc) and Ebrar Beşinci (PhD student).

Fragmentary sentences. Prof. James Griffiths is the Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded project Cross-Linguistic Experiments on Fragmentary Sentences (CLEFS) (2023-2026). This project undertakes a crosslinguistic comparative investigation of the formal and discursive licensing conditions on clausal ellipsis. It employs large-scale acceptability judgment experiments and focuses on English, German, and Turkish. This project also involves Ali Can Çiçek (PhD student) and Miriam Schiele (PhD student).

Strategic language in political discourse. Dr. Andreas Kehl is one of the Principal Investigators (along with Prof. Winkler and Prof. Kramer) of project C1 of CRC 1718 Common Ground (2025-2029). This project investigates from a rhetorical and linguistic perspective how CG is established and destroyed in political discourses. The central assumption is that rhetorical and linguistic patterns (such as presuppositions, deletions, ambiguities, and emotionalization) drive the strategic construction and destruction of CG and fuel polarization.

• Generative syntax, with a focus on English (various courses!)
• The syntax-pragmatics interface (various courses!)
• Morphology, with a focus on English
• How to conduct and analyze acceptability judgment experiments
• Quantitative and psycholinguistics
• Discourse structure

Prof. Griffiths took over the chair of English Linguistics in October 2025. Its previous occupant was Prof. Susanne Winkler. For information about the projects and research foci of the chair prior to October 2025, please visit Prof. Winkler's personal page.