Timea Sarvas

PhD Student, Linguistics Department
University of Potsdam

Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25
House 14, office 3.40
14476 Potsdam

sarvas@uni-potsdam.de

About Me

I'm a doctoral candidate in the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre 1287 at the University of Potsdam. Supervised by Doreen Georgi, I study the variability of sharing constructions within and across languages with a special focus on their reconstruction potential. My main focus is on formal and experimental (morpho-) syntax, occasionally dabbling in semantics. I am most fond of languages outside of the Indo-European family, having experience working with Uralic, Turkic and Niger-Congo languages. I strive to combine theoretical linguistics with experimental methods and don't shy away from coding in R (although it can be a struggle sometimes, I find it quite rewarding and frankly inescapable nowadays). I have yet to branch out to Bayesian statistics, feeling more comfortable in the frequentist framework.

Current Projects

Reconstruction potential of ATB and PG constructions in English, German, and Hungarian
Exhaustivity of embedded questions in Akan (with Nadine Bade)
Case and agreement in Turkish relative clauses
(Verbal) affix order in Hungarian (with Johannes Rothert)
Object agreement in Tundra Nenets

Education

You can download my full CV here.

I received a Bachelor of Arts in 2018 from the University of Tübingen, majoring in Deutsch als Zweitsprache (German as a second language) with a minor in General Linguistics. My thesis consisted of a case study of a child L2 learner of German with both Serbocroatian and Hungarian as their L1, aiming to see how knowledge of a genderless (Hungarian) and article-less (Serbocroatian) language impacted the acquisition of the German gender and case system.

In 2021, I received a Master of Science in Linguistics from the University of Potsdam. I wrote my thesis on Anti Agreement in Turkish relative clauses, aiming to disambiguate what case and agreement patterns are grammatical across nonsubject relative clauses in particular, and how good of a predictor the subject's specificity is. I conducted an online experiment with about 80 participants with results that could not fully verify either of the analyses proposed this far. You can download my thesis from the list of publications.

Publications

Master Thesis

Sarvas, Timea. 2021. Case and Agreement Patterns in Turkish Nonsubject Relative Clauses. An Experimental Approach. MA Thesis, University of Potsdam.

Posters

Sarvas, Timea & Johannes Rothert. 2020. Challenges for Theories of (Post-) Syntactic Head Movement: Tense and Modality in Hungarian. Poster presented at SinFonIJA 13, Budapest.