Eva Zehentner, Dr.
- SNF Postdoc & Academic Associate in English Linguistics
- Phone
- +41 44 634 36 72
- Room number
- PLH-207
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I’m a historical English linguist currently employed as a senior research and teaching assistant (‘Oberassistentin’) in linguistics at the ES (2021-). In autumn term 2024, I was a visiting professor at Kyoto University, and I will be starting my own SNSF Starting Grant project in AS 2025. I got my PhD at the University of Vienna in 2016; from 2017-2020, I was a lecturer at the University of York, UK; and from 2018, I worked as a postdoc in an SNSF-project on prepositions in argument structure at the ES (PI: Marianne Hundt). The historical part of this also forms my habilitation project.
My main research focus is on diachronic morphosyntax from Old to Late Modern English; I particularly like syntactic alternations, and cognitive-functional explanations for their emergence and loss. The specific theoretical approaches I use are usage-based, cognitive (diachronic) construction grammar, as well as evolutionary linguistics. As for methods, I’m first and foremost a quantitative corpus linguist, but also have a keen interest in e.g. evolutionary game theory. My SNSF-project will be concerned with investigating changes in strategies for argument disambiguation (such as case marking or word order) in early English by means of state-of-the-art statistical and AI-based methods.
Some recent and forthcoming publications from the prepositions project as well as upcoming invited talks on the topic include the following:
Zehentner, E. 2024. Alternations (at) that time: NP vs PP time adjuncts in the history of English. Linguistics Vanguard 10(s1), 19-28. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0054
Sommerer, L. & E. Zehentner. forthcoming. Go to church or die in prison: PPs with bare institutional nouns in the history of English. Folia Linguistica Historica.
Zehentner, E. accepted. The English conative alternation between semantics, complexity, and ambiguity: A historical perspective. Language and Cognition.
PhilSoc Meeting, University College London; 17 January 2025, London, UK: ‘All things prepositional: argument structure throughout the history of English’
Other recent publication projects include an edited special issue on ‘Ambiguity (avoidance) as a factor in language change’ in Journal of Historical Linguistics, which emerged from a co-organised workshop at the International Conference of Historical Linguistics 2023. I have furthermore been acting as General Editor for the journal Language and Cognition (CUP), and as the section editor of ‘Diachrony and Language Evolution’ for the 3rd edition of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics.
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“BA seminar Variation and Change: Morphosyntactic change” |
FS 2024 |
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“History of the English Language: Focus on Middle English (Love and chivalry in the Middle Ages)” |
FS 2024 |
| “Methods and theories in English linguistics” | AS 2023 |
| “BA seminar Variation and Change: Mechanisms in language change” | FS 2023 |
| “Language, use & cognition: Construction grammar” | AS 2022 |
| “MA seminar: Evolutionary linguistics” | FS 2022 |
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