Dr. Giuseppe Varaschin

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik

Giuseppe Varaschin is a postdoctoral researcher in Project A04: Building Register into the Architecture of Language — An HPSG Account within the framework of the SFB 1412 Register: Language-Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation. He was formerly a Humboldt Research Fellow hosted at the same institution.

Giuseppe’s primary research interests are syntactic theory, the syntax-semantics interface, register, Romance syntax, Germanic syntax and the philosophy of linguistics. He is also interested in developing computer-processable grammar fragments as a way of checking the formal consistency and large-scale empirical adequacy of theoretical proposals. His current work concerns the formal modelling of constraints on anaphoric relations and intra-individual syntactic variation in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). He has previously worked on the formalization of a parallel architecture of grammar, where syntax, semantics and phonology are treated as independent combinatorial systems.

Projects

MGK Integrated Graduate School
A04 Building register into the architecture of language – an HPSG account

Contact

Dorotheenstr. 24 (Room: 3.304), D-10117 Berlin

giuseppe.varaschin@hu-berlin.deWebsite

Postal address

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik) Unter den Linden 6, D-10099 Berlin

Dr. Giuseppe Varaschin

Publications & Presentations

    Publications

  • Varaschin, Giuseppe; Machicao y Priemer, Antonio; Lu, Yanru  (2024) Topic drop in German: Grammar and usage  In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar [DOI] [ViVo]
    German topic drop clauses are a subtype of declarative clauses where the initial position (usually filled by an overt constituent) is left empty. It is often noted that topic drop appears mainly in specific registers (e.g. spoken dialogues), but this claim has neither been previously experimentally validated, nor formally implemented. In this paper, we report the results of a matched-guise study which indicate that the syntactic variation between topic drop and regular V2 declaratives in fact correlates with different social meanings, leading to the register variation postulated in the literature. In order to model German speakers' grammatical and register knowledge about topic drop in HPSG we propose, (i) a unified grammatical constraint that licenses topic drop structures, (ii) a formal theory of register that treats social meanings as a type of use-conditional content subject to compositional rules.
  • Varaschin, Giuseppe; Culicover, Peter W.; Winkler, Susanne  (2023) In pursuit of Condition C: (Non-)coreference in grammar, discourse and processing  In: Information Structure and Discourse in Generative Grammar [ViVo]

    • Presentations

  • Varaschin, Giuseppe; Machicao y Priemer, Antonio  (2022) Agreement mismatches and register-driven variation in Brazilian Portuguese  In: Oberseminar Syntax and Semantics, Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main [ViVo]