Timea Sarvas

PhD Student (she/her)
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 an aspiring linguist who gathers (experimental) evidence to test and develop theories of grammar. My goal is to get a better idea of how language is represented in our minds. I'm a doctoral candidate in the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre 1287 at the University of Potsdam, and my dissertation project concerns the variability of sharing constructions within and across languages. I investigate their reconstruction potential for Binding Principle C to find out more about their underlying syntax. My supervisors are Doreen Georgi and Malte Zimmermann. Beyond this project, I am particularly interested in studying languages outside of the Indo-European family that have received little attention from experimental linguists this far. I have experience working with Turkic and Niger-Congo languages, and the ones that are most dear to me, Uralic languages. My usual perspective is that of a (morpho-) syntactician, occasionally dabbling in semantics.

Current Projects

Reconstruction potential of ATB and PG constructions for Binding Principle C (doctoral dissertation)
Exhaustivity of embedded questions in Akan (with Nadine Bade)
(Verbal) affix order in Hungarian, upcoming talk at Console 30
Case and agreement in Turkish relative clauses
Object agreement in Tundra Nenets

Education

You can access my full CV here.

I obtained 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.