News

Teaching and Advising

Graduate Courses

  • English and German Morphology
  • German Syntax
  • Phonology-Morphology Interfaces in English and German
  • Rhetoric & Stylistics
  • A Linguistic Approach to Political, Social, and Cultural Opposition: The Case of Texas Germans
  • The Acquisition of English and German
  • Introduction to Synchronic Linguistics of English and German
  • Contrastive Lexical Semantics
  • Language Contact and Language Death
  • Contrastive Syntax of English and German: A Construction Grammar Perspective
  • Expanding Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics
  • Frame Semantics

Undergraduate Courses

  • Introduction to Language
  • Language and Society in the German-speaking Countries
  • Introduction to Germanic Linguistics
  • Advanced German Grammar
  • Language and Politics
  • Documentation and Analysis of Texas German
  • Sprache und Politik (‘Language and Politics’)
  • The Texas-German Experience
  • The Texas German Dialect
  • German I
  • German II

Former Ph.D. Students

  • David James, Ph.D. 2003 (“The Second Generation: Language Use among Migrants in Berlin”). Currently employed as Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.
  • Heiko Wiggers, Ph.D. 2005 (“Dialect Death on the German/Dutch border”). Currently employed as an Associate Professor at Wake Forest University (tenured). After a severe illness, Heiko unfortunately passed away in April of 2024.
  • Karen Roesch, Ph.D. 2009 (“Texas Alsatian: Henri Castro’s Legacy”). Currently employed as Assistant Professor, Hoyt-Reichmann Scholar of German-American Studies, and Director of the Max Kade German American Resource Center at Indiana University – Purdue University at Indianapolis.
  • James Kearney, Ph.D. 2010 (“Friedrichsburg by Friedrich Armand Strubberg: Translated and Annotated by James C. Kearney”). Co-supervision with Janet Swaffar. Currently employed as lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin.
  • Guido Halder, Ph.D. 2011 (“A frame-semantic approach to selectional restrictions in German Support Verb Constructions: The case of [in X geraten]”). Currently employed as Assistant Professor at Washington and Jefferson College.
  • Anja Moehring, Ph.D. 2013 (“Argument marking with prepositions in German: A constructional approach to ‘auf’ (‘on’)”). Currently employed as lecturer at Baylor University.
  • Maggie Gemmell, Ph.D. 2015 (“Semantic role alignment in metaphor: A frame semantic approach to metaphoric meaning.”) Currently employed as Adjunct Instructor of German in the Division of Humanities and Culture at Southern Oregon University.
  • David Huenlich, Ph.D. 2016 (“The roots of multiethnolects: Effects of migration on the lexicon and speech of German”). Currently employed as a junior researcher at the Catholic University Eichstaett, Germany.
  • Ryan Dux, Ph.D. 2016 (“A usage-based approach to verb classes in English and German”). Visiting Assistant Professor of German and Linguistics at Bucknell University (2016-17), Mellon-Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the German Language (2017-2018), Employed as Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at Sam Houston State University (since 2018).
  • Annika VanNoy, Ph.D. 2017 (“Culture-specific aspects of semantic frames in multilingual frame descriptions”). Employed outside of academia.
  • Alexander Lorenz, Ph.D. 2018 (“Beliefs about grammar instruction among post-secondary second-language learners and teachers”). Employed as Assistant Professor (tenure track) at the University of South Carolina (Upstate) (since 2018).
  • Margo Blevins, Ph.D. 2022 (“The language-tagging & orthographic normalization of German-language contact varieties“). Employed as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin (since 2022).
  • Matthias Warmuth, Ph.D. 2023 (“Phonological convergence and variation in a dying language variety: The case of Texas German”).

Advising of visiting postdoctoral researchers

  • Jun Li, Lecturer, Central China Normal University, P.R. China. Research: Construction Grammar, Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics. (2024-2025)
  • Yubin Qian, Associate Professor, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China. Research: Corpus-based narrative study: Discourse modeling from a multidimensional perspective. (August 2013 – February 2024).
  • Yu Miao, Assistant Professor, Sichuan University, Chengdu, P.R. China. Research: Multilingual Motivation in Second Language Learning. (August 2023 – July 2024)
  • Sun Yu, Associate Professor, Heilongjang Bayi Agricultural University, P.R. China. Research: Cultural pragmatics, second language acquisition. (January 2023 – December 2023)
  • Wu Wei, Professor, Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering, P.R. China. Research: Psycholinguistics, lexical semantics, second language acquisition. (March 2023 – February 2024).
  • Verena Sauer, Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, University of Kiel, Germany. Research: German Dialectology, Language Contact, Frame Semantics. (October 2022-October 2023).
  • Jun Li, Lecturer, Central China Normal University, P.R. China. Research: Construction Grammar, Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics. (2019-2020; research stay interrupted by Covid-19 pandemic, March 2020)
  • Wang Yagang, Lecturer, Ningbo University, P.R. China. Research: Cognitive-functional linguistics, constructionalization, evaluative constructions. (July 2019 – March 2020).
  • Ayodele Ayotunde, Associate Professor, Lagos State University, Nigeria. Research: Discourse Analysis and Online Communication. (August 2019)
  • Zhan Min, Associate Professor, Zhejian Financial College, P.R. China. Research: Critical Discourse Analysis. (May 2019 – August 2019).
  • Yuanyuan Huang, Lecturer, China Pharmaceutical University, P.R. China. Research: Construction Grammar and Second Language Acquisition. (Dec. 2018 – Dec. 2019).
  • Zhou Xiatao, Lecturer, Shanxi University, P.R. China. Research: Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Language Testing. (August 2018 – August 2019).
  • Wang Xiaohui, Lecturer, Ningbo University, P.R. China. Research: Construction Grammar and idiomatic constructions. (October 2018 – April 2019).
  • Hasebe Yoichiro, Associate Professor, Doshisha University, Japan. Research: Cognitive Linguistics, Construction Grammar, Contrastive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics. (August 2018 – August 2019).
  • Zhang Xiangming, Associate Professor, Guangdong University of Finance and Economics. P.R. China. Research: Bilingual Lexicography, Lexical Semantics, Contrastive Linguistics.(August 2018 – August 2019)
  • Han Guochun, Lecturer, Hangzhou Dianzi University, P.R. China. Research: Second Language Acquisition and Assessment, CALL, Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics.(August 2018 – August 2019).
  • Thomas Schmidt, Director of the Division of Spoken Language Corpora, Institute for the German Language, Mannheim, Germany. Research: Archiving of Spoken Data (February – April 2018)
  • Duan Shi-ping, Associate Professor, Zhongyuan University of Technology, P.R. China. Research: Lexicography, Corpus Linguistics, Second language acquisition. (August 2017 – August 2018)
  • Hsu Ting-Ting, Assistant Professor, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan.  Research: Cognitive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Contrastive Analysis. (July 2017 – July 2018).
  • Liu Jiang, Associate Professor, Dalian University, P.R. China. Research: Cognitive Linguistics, Construction Grammar, Contrastive Linguistics. (April 2017 – April 2018).
  • Karen Roesch, Assistant Professor, IUPUI, Indianapolis, IN. Research: German language Islands (August-December 2017).
  • Ruiliang Tang, Associate Professor, Southwest University, P.R. China. Research: Cnstruction Grammar and Language Change. (February 2016 – February 2017).
  • Fujikawa Katsuya. Associate Professor, University of Toyama, Japan. Research: Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar. (September 2016-September 2017)
  • Katharina Mucha, Postdoctoral researcher, Paderborn University, Germany. Research: Cognitive Sociolinguistics and Construction Grammar. (Sept. 2016 – August 2017).
  • Shen Lei, Associate Professor, Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, PR China. Research: Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics. (September 2016 – August 2017).
  • Liu Qi, Associate Professor, Hangzhou Dianzi University, PR China. Research Topic: Contrastive Construction Grammar. (August 2015 – June 2016).
  • Shuguang Li, Associate Professor, Nanjing Normal University, PR China. Research Topic: Construction Grammar, FrameNet, and language teaching.  (August 2014-August 2015).
  • Guo Xia, Lecturer, University of Sichuan, PR China. Research Topic: Resultative Constructions in Chinese. (August 2014 – July 2015)
  • Jianing He, Professor, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, PR China. Research Topic: Business English FrameNet dictionary for Chinese learners. (August 2014 – July 2015).
  • Heiko Wiggers, Assistant Professor, Wake Forest University, North Carolina. Research Topic: German language islands. (August – December 2012)
  • Liusheng Xi, Associate Professor, Wenzhou University, PR China. Research Topic: Resultative constructions in Chinese. (January – May 2012)
  • Soojung Kim, Assistant Professor, Changwon National University, S. Korea. Research Topic: Phonetics of English and Korean / Maritime Language. (August 2011 – May 2012)
  • Rove Chishman, Associate Professor, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Lingüística Aplicada Unisinos, Brazil. Research topic: Multilingual Lexicography. (January – May 2009)
  • Chin-Do Kim, Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, Konkuk University, South Korea. Research topic: Polysemy of Korean and German Adjectives and Prepositions. (January – May 2002)

Advising of visiting Ph.D. students

  • Silu Siltaloppi, Ph.D. student, University of Helsinki, Finland. Research: Construction Grammar and Sign Languages. (September – November 2019).
  • Mansoureh Delaramifar, Ph.D. student, Sistan and Baluchistan University, Islamic Republic of Iran. Research: Computational Linguistics, Lexical Semantics, Historical Linguistics, Dialectology. (February – August 2018).
  • Diego Spader de Souza. Ph.D. student, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil. Research: Frame Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Digital Lexicography. (September 2017 – January 2018).
  • Tatiane Silva Tavares, Ph.D. student, Federal University of Juiz de For a, Brazil. Research: Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, Lexicography, Machine Translation. (August 2017-December 2017).
  • Deng Lin, Ph.D. candidate, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, P.R. China. Research:         Lexicography, Corpus Linguistics, Lexical Semantics. (August 2017 – August 2018)
  • Mayowa Akinlotan, Ph.D. student, Free University of Brussels, Belgium. Research: New Englishes and Corpus Linguistics (May 2017-May 2018).
  • Chen Yun, Ph.D. student, Sichuan University, PR China. Research: Cognitive Linguistics. (February-November 2017)
  • Gan Qingfeng, Ph.D. student at Shanghai University, PR China. Research topic: Contrastive             Construction Grammar. (August 2015 – August 2016).
  • Anna Shadrova, Ph.D. student at the Humboldt-University Berlin. Research topic: Verbs and           constructions in German as a foreign language. (March – June 2015).
  • Alba Luzondo, Ph.D. student at the University of La Rioja, Spain. Research topic: “Construction grammar and Frame Semantics.” Stay sponsored by the Spanish ministry of education. (Aug. – Dec. 2010. )
  • Nuria Del Camo Martinez, Ph.D. student at the University of La Rioja, Spain. Research topic: “Construction grammar and Frame Semantics.” Stay sponsored by the Spanish ministry of education. August–December 2010.
  • Anderson Bertoldi, Ph.D. student at UNISONOS University, Brazil. Research topic: “Multilingual FrameNets.” Stay sponsored by Brazilian Federal Research Agency CAPES.(Jan. 2010–Dec. 2010).
  • Han-Chun Huang, Ph.D. student at the National Tsung Hua University, Taiwan. Research topic: “Resultative Constructions in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hakka.” Stay sponsored by the Taiwanese Science Foundation. (September 2006-April 2007).