Paola Fritz-Huechante

Paola Fritz-Huechante is a researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik. Her current work in the SFB (Project A04) focuses on the interface of semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, particularly the intersection of politeness theory and speech acts. She is interested in the study of requests in Spanish, examining how grammatical structures – such as dative (le) vs. accusative (lo) clitics – interact with pragmatic factors like psychological distance, speaker authority, and imposition.
Her research explores how language users navigate politeness strategies in communication, shedding light on how social and cognitive factors shape linguistic choices. Through experimental methods, she investigates the nuanced ways in which speakers encode politeness, manage social relationships, and negotiate power dynamics through requests.
Her research interests extend to the semantics of change of state verbs, with a focus on psychological verbs in languages such as Spanish and Korean. She works on event structure, non-culmination, and scalarity, investigating how experiencer object (EO) psych verbs encode mental state changes across languages. Her cross-linguistic analysis of EO verbs examines the classification of EO predicates as encoding left-bounded states where the experiencer’s mental state is initiated, in contrast to the traditional classification of EO predicates as culminating accomplishments.
By integrating (formal) semantic analysis with experimental data, her work contributes to broader discussions in event semantics, argument structure, and cross-linguistic variation, offering new insights into how mental state changes are linguistically encoded.

Projects

MGK Integrated Graduate School
A06 Modeling register variation across languages

Contact

Dorotheenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin

paola.fritz@hu-berlin.deWebsite https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9719-9436