Englisches Seminar

Dr. Timo Buchholz

Hi! I'm a postdoc in Project B5 “Clarifying the Common Ground” of the CRC 1718 “Common Ground” with James Griffiths and Ebrar Beşinci. In that project we're investigating the relationship between form and meaning of clarification (echo, reprise) questions crosslinguistically, using experimental methods to decide between formal theories of question update. We just started in October 2025, so watch this space for …updates! 

Before that, I was a postdoc with Klaus von Heusinger in a project on conceptual and referential activation in discourse in the second phase of the CRC 1252 “Prominence in Language” in Cologne, and before that, I did my PhD in Linguistics with Uli Reich in Berlin on the prosody and information structure of bilingual speakers of Quechua and Spanish based on fieldwork in Peru. My (broad) research interests are (formal) pragmatics, prosody and crosslinguistic comparison, in particular the question of how discourse context and formal linguistic encoding (morphosyntax and prosody) interact in achieving such effects as inquisitiveness, presupposition and reference. I use both experimental and corpus techniques to investigate a broad range of theories. 

E-mail: timo [dot] buchholz [at] uni-tuebingen [dot] de

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/timobuchholz/home

Office hours: by email appointment / Sprechstunde nach Vereinbarung per Mail 

 

Publications

Buchholz, Timo, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger. 2025. Its prominence is her prominence: on the relationship between propositional and individual reference. Journal of Pragmatics 242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.013 . Accompanying repository: https://osf.io/encu4/

Buchholz, Timo, Raúl Bendezú Araujo & Uli Reich. Accepted. Spanish in contact with Quechua in Northern Peru. In Joachim Steffen, Leonardo Cerno, Hans-Jörg Döhla, Robert Hesselbach, & Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Eds.), Contact varieties of Spanish and Spanish-lexified contact varieties. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Buchholz, Timo & Klaus von Heusinger. 2024. German demonstratives and topic questions. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 46. 5143-5150. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vd8g5rb 

Buchholz, Timo & Klaus von Heusinger. 2024. German demonstrative pronouns differ in their sensitivity to discourse and sentence topics. Frontiers in Communication 9. 1369290. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1369290 . Accompanying repository: https://osf.io/spwhn/

Buchholz, Timo. 2023. Intonation between phrasing and accent. Spanish and Quechua in Huari (Lingüística Latinoamericana 7). Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111304595 Accompanying repository: https://osf.io/mah8z/ 

Buchholz, Timo. 2022. Was ist das für 1 huk? A Conchucos Quechua numeral doing curious things. In Gianollo, Chiara, Łukasz Jędrzejowski & Sofiana I. Lindemann  (eds.), Paths through meaning and form: Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 27-30. Köln: Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18716/omp.3.c14 

Buchholz, Michael, Timo Buchholz & Barbara Wülfing. 2021. Doing Contrariness: Therapeutic Talk-In-Interaction in a Single Therapy Session With a Traumatized Child. Frontiers in Psychology 12. 545966.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.545966 

Buchholz, Timo & Uli Reich. 2018. The realizational coefficient: Devising a method for empirically determining prominent positions in Conchucos Quechua. In Ingo Feldhausen, Jan Fliessbach & Maria d. M. Vanrell (eds.), Methods in prosody: A Romance language perspective (Studies in Laboratory Phonology 6), 123–164. Berlin: Language Science Press.  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1471564

Published Language Corpora

Bendezú Araujo, Raúl, Timo Buchholz & Uli Reich. 2021. Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Huari Spanisch 1). https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/29497. DOI: 10.17169/REFUBIUM-29241

Bendezú Araujo, Raúl, Timo Buchholz & Uli Reich. 2019.Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Quechua 1). https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/25747. DOI: 10.17169/REFUBIUM-25510

Recent Talks and Posters

Timo Buchholz: Accessing factive embedded clauses: effects of continuation, prosody and their interaction. Talk. XPRAG 2025, Cambridge, UK 

Timo Buchholz: Accessing the content of factive embedded clauses: interacting effects of intonational tunes and continuation. Poster. Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PAPE25), Palma de Mallorca, Spain

Timo Buchholz: Effects of prosody and continuation on propositional anaphor resolution. Invited talk at Lund University, May 2025, Sweden

Timo Buchholz: Effects of subordination on anaphor resolution in Japanese and German. Talk. Germanistischer Arbeitskreis Köln-Tokyo (GAKT-BI), April 2025, Bielefeld

Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger: Prominence relations between argument and clause structure. Poster. XPRAG.it 2024, Venice, Italy

Magdalena Repp & Timo Buchholz: Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis on German personal and d-pronouns in narrative texts. Poster. XPRAG.it 2024, Venice, Italy

Timo Buchholz & Klaus von Heusinger: German Demonstratives and Topic Questions. Poster. CogSci 2024, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger: Prominence relations between propositional and individual referents. Poster. Architectures and mechanisms for language processing (AMLAP23), San Sebastian, Spanien

Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger: Prominence relations between individual and propositional referents. Poster. XPRAG 2023, Paris, France

Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger: The pragmatics of high boundary tones in German. Talk. 18th Conference of the International Pragmatics Association (IPC18), Brussels, Belgium

Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger: The interaction of syntactic and prosodic cues on clausal prominence and reference resolution. Talk. DGfS 2023, Köln

Timo Buchholz: Word stress and intonation in Conchucos Quechua and Spanish. Talk. Kolloquium Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, January 2023, Köln

Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek & Klaus von Heusinger: Clausal prominence and coreference: the interaction of syntactic and prosodic cues. Poster. XPRAG 2022, Pavia, Italien

Timo Buchholz: Prosodic and syntactic cues to at-issueness and (in)dependent discourse updates. Talk. Germanistischer Arbeitskreis Köln-Tokyo (GAKT 7), July 2022, Köln

Timo Buchholz: Intonation between Phrasing and Accent.Spanish and Quechua in Huari. Talk. Linguistischer Arbeitskreis, January 2022, Universität zu Köln

Timo Buchholz: No word stress in Conchucos Quechua? Evidence from peak alignment data. Poster/Flash talk. Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PAPE21), Barcelona, Spain (online)