Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Prof. Dr. Markus Egg

Curriculum vitae


Education

2001 Habilitation in General Linguistics, Universität des Saarlandes.
1993 PhD in Linguistics, Universität Konstanz.
1987-1993 Universität Konstanz, Germany.
1986-1987 St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.
1984-1986 Universität Erlangen, Germany.
1974-1983 Neues Gymnasium Nürnberg, Germany.


Dissertation

Title Aktionsart und Kompositionalität. Zur kompositionellen Ableitung der Aktionsart komplexer Kategorien. (Aktionsart and compositionality. On the compositional derivation of the aktionsart of complex categories.) [distributed in the series ‘studia grammatica’, Akademie-Verlag Berlin, 1995]
Supervisors A. v. Stechow (Tübingen) and P. Pause (Konstanz)
Grade ‘summa cum laude’
Award (Unshared) dissertation award ‘Award of the City of Konstanz for the promotion of junior academics at the University of Konstanz’ (prize for the best dissertation of the year 1993 in Language and Literature)
Summary On the basis of an aspectual classification that divides verbal expressions that denote states of affairs with inherent boundaries (often dubbed ‘event predicates’) into two groups (depending on whether they introduce a change of state or not), I show how the aspect of complex phrases like to sing a song vs. to sing songs or to go into the garden vs. to look into the garden can be derived compositionally.


Habilitation

Title Flexible semantic construction: the case of reinterpretation. [distributed under the title Flexible semantics for reinterpretation phenomena in the series ‘CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics’, CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2005]
Committee Manfred Pinkal, Matt Crocker, Hans Uszkoreit (Universität des Saarlandes), Stephen Pulman (Somerville College, Oxford)
Summary I present a unified - and computationally feasible - approach to semantic construction for cases of reinterpretation (aspectual type coercion and metonymy). The semantic representations are derived on the basis of an HPSG syntax analysis. The approach is cast in a suitable underspecification formalism for the description of all kinds of structural ambiguity, which means that the interaction of type coercion/metonymy with phenomena like scope can be captured.


Professional experience

2007-2008 Head of the department of Communication and Information Science at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
2005-2008 Associate Professor (Universitair Hoofddocent) at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
2001-2003 Deputy for several chairs at the Universities of Bielefeld, Leipzig, and Jena.
1997-2004 Researcher in the Sonderforschungsbereich ‘Ressourcenadaptive kognitive Prozesse’ in the project ‘Constraint-based higher-order representations for underspecified semantics (CHORUS)’ at the Universität des Saarlandes.
1994-1996 Member (1994) and head (1995-96) of the sections ‘Semantic Construction’ and ‘Semantic Evaluation’ of the German ‘Verbmobil’ project (machine translation of spoken language) for IBM Germany.
1994-1996 Researcher in the Sonderforschungsbereich 340 Stuttgart-Tübingen-Heidelberg ‘Sprachtheoretische Grundlagen für die Computerlinguistik’ in the research project ‘Wissensquellen für die Interpretation von Modifikationsstrukturen’.
1989-1993 Researcher in the research project ‘Theory of the Lexicon’ at the University of Konstanz.


Scholarships

Scholarship of the Bavarian State
Scholarship of the ‘Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes


Memberships

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft
Gesellschaft für Semantik
International Pragmatics Association
Association for Computational Linguistics
Anglistenverband