Kurt Erbach

I am a researcher and lecturer working on nominal semantics, focusing on changes in partitivity in historical and present day varieties of English. This focus is my habilitation project, which I am carrying out under Remus Gergel, in English Linguistics at Saarland University. I am also the manager of the University of Frankfurt Semantics Laboratory under Cornelia Ebert where I work on the semantics of gesture.

My linguistics research sits at the intersection of mathematical and social issues, namely how we individuate (or fail to individuate) objects, people, social groups and categories. My long term goal is modeling semantic complexity and its role in diachronic changes. My short term goals include refining models partitivity that capture complexity across varities of English, both historical and in the present day. I also have ongoing projects looking at the count-mass distinction in other languages.

I am also committed to humanist language research, and am continuing research that began in the project “Rasse” - Zur Aushandlung eine belasteten deutschen Ausdrucks, which investigated language use and policy in Germany and the US.

News

July 21, 2025. Paper Testing dialects with simulations: the status of pseudo-partitives in US English with Remus Gergel, published in Linguistica Brunensia.

June 6, 2025. Talk “Testing historical developments via language contact” at Varieties in Contact: Phenomena – Methods – Theories, at Universität Dortmund.

May 29, 2025. Talk “Binding pronouns to discourse referents introduced with pointing gestures” at Referential Expressions in Discourse (RED) 2025, at Universität Graz.

Apr 2, 2025. Invited talk “Are nouns biased, or are we? Data and theories, counting and measuring, Old and Present Day English”, at Charles University, Prague.

Primary Projects

Partitivity in English (Habilitation)

Looking at the interaction of semantic and syntactic structures for expressing partitive and pseudo-partitive meaning in the history of English, this project motivates a new model of language change that captures these interactions to predict present day variation.

Output

"Direct pseudo-partitives in US English", with Remus Gergel. (Paper)

In a sentence: A corpus study shows regular use of direct pseudo-partitives with measures in US English and we aruge for distinct syntactic strucures for measure and container readings of pseudo-partitives.

"Of of from 'from': Rethinking the partitive cycle".(Paper)

In a sentence: I argue that pseudo-partitives are the result of reanalysis of "of" rather than grammaticalizatoin.

"Testing dialects with simulations: The status of pseudo-partitives in US English", with Remus Gergel (Paper)

In a sentence: Experiments corroborate corpus results showing that speakers of US English prefer measure readings of direct pseudo-partitives than container readings.

"Testing historical developments via language contact". (Talk at Varietätenkontakt: Phänomene - Methoden - Theorien)

In a sentence: Across varieties of English, direct pseudo-partitives are a stable phenomonen suggesting that this is due to language internal change rather than language or dialectal contact.

"Partitives in the Grammatical History Germanic Languages" (R&R)

In a sentence: Across Germanic languages there has been a general shift from genitive case being used for both partitive and pseudo-paritive structures to the disambiguation of these structures in various ways.

Plural individuals in gesture semantics (SLE Early career researcher grant)

The target of this research project is number within gesture semantics, namely whether the discourse referent introduced by a singular palm-up gesture—i.e. showing the palm of one hand as if presenting something—is interpreted as a singular or plural when occurring as a co-speech gesture with the utterance of a plural individual like "Sam and Diane"

Output

Singular gestures and plural individuals. (Talk at the Semantics Colloquium of Goethe-University, Frankfurt

Secondary and Previous Projects

The semantics of gesture--speech interaction

Looking at multi-modal anaphora, such as verbal pronouns binding to discourse referents introduced by co-speech gestures, this project motivates a novel analyses for the semantics of dynamic binding  in gesture-speech interaction.

Output

Experimental findings of dynamic binding  in gesture-speech interaction, with Cornelia Ebert and Magnus Poppe. (Paper; OSF repository)
Non-maximality effects in gestural plural predication, with Stavroula Alexandropoulou (first author), Richard Breheny, Clemens Mayr, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo. (Paper)
Binding presuppositions to iconic gestures, with Cornelia Ebert and Magnus Poppe. (Talk at Dimensions of Iconicity in the Visual Modality)
Binding pronouns to discourse referents introduced with pointing gestures, with Cornelia Ebert and Magnus Poppe. (Talk at Mismatches in anaphoric relations (RED 25))

Countability in English

Output

Diachronic analyses

The development of the collectivization construction in English (R&R)
Number classifying to number marking: Change in English countability (Forthcoming in Lexis – Journal in English Lexicology)

Countability in present Day Englishes

Shifting interpretations: Count and mass in linguistic categorization (Forthcoming)
Countability shifts in the normative dimension, with Leda Berio [Paper].
Varieties of mass/count interpretation of hybrid nouns, with Yasu Sudo (Abstract).

Countability across Languages

Output

Sorani Kurdish

The count-mass distinction in Central Kurdish ([Paper]).
Variation in Countability Properties and Noun Classes; Countability in Central Kurdish, with Delan Kheder ([Paper]).

Greek

The acquisition of object mass noun
Object mass nouns in Greek, with Vasileia Skrimpa ([Abstract](https://www.linguisticsociety.org/abstract/object-mass-nouns-greek)).
A measure based analysis of plural nouns in Greek ([Paper]).

Hungarian

Bare nouns and the Hungarian mass/count distinction, with Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip ([Paper]).
Object mass nouns and subkind countability, with Aviv Schoenfeld ([Paper], [Repository]).

Japanese

Object Mass Nouns as Arbiter for the Mass/Count Category, with Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip, and Katrin Byrdeck ([Paper]).
Object Mass Nouns in Japanese, with Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip, and Katrin Byrdeck ([Paper]).

Predicting object mass nouns across languges ([Paper]).

The concept of raⅽe in US English and Federal German

Output

How do Germans and US-Americans Conceive of Raⅽe? Using Corpus Analysis and Semantic Feature Production Tasks to Compare the Structure of Raⅽe Conceptions, with Benedict Kenyah-Damptey, Leda Berio, Daniel James, (Under review) [Repository]).
A comparative corpus study of "raⅽe" and "Rasse", with Benedict Kenyah-Damptey, Leda Berio, Daniel James, Esther Seyffarth, [Paper]).

Plurality and Homogeneity

Output

Putting Plural Definites into Context, with Jacopo Romoli, Yasu Sudo, Richard Breheny, and Clemens Mayr (Under Review)
Putting summative predicates into context, with Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Richard Breheny, Clemens Mayr, Jacopo Romoli, and Yasu Sudo
Non-maximality effects in gestural plural predication, with Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Richard Breheny, Clemens Mayr, Jacopo Romoli, and Yasu Sudo
Fighting for a share of the covers: Accounting for inaccessible readings of plural predicates (Paper).
Readings of Plurals and Common Ground, with Leda Berio (Paper).

Publications

(by publication date)

Erbach, Kurt. Forthcoming. Shifting interpretations: Count and mass in linguistic categorization. Lexis.
Erbach, Kurt and Remus Gergel. (2025). Testing dialects with simulations: the status of pseudo-partitives in US English. Linguistica Brunensia 73 (1): 93-111. DOI: 10.5817/LB2025-38532
Erbach, Kurt. 2025. Of of from ‘from’: Rethinking the partitive cycle. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10 (1): 5883. DOI: 10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5883
Erbach, Kurt and Remus Gergel. 2025. Direct pseudo-partitives in US English. Linguistics Vanguard. DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0098
Erbach, Kurt, Magnus Poppe, and Cornelia Ebert. 2025. Experimental findings for a cross-modal account of dynamic binding in gesture-speech interaction. Proceedings of ELM 3. DOI: 10.3765/elm.3.5830
Alexandropoulou, Stavroula, Kurt Erbach, Richard Breheny, Clemens Mayr, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo. 2024. Non-maximality effects in gestural plural predication. The Proceedings of the 24rd Amsterdam Colloquium. Link: https://events.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC2024/Proceedings/
Erbach, Kurt, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Richard Breheny, Clemens Mayr, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo. 2024. Putting summative predicates into context The Proceedings of the 24rd Amsterdam Colloquium. Link: https://events.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC2024/Proceedings/
Erbach, Kurt. 2024. The count–mass distinction in Central Kurdish. In Grond, Agnes and Songül Gündoğdu (eds.), Current Issues in Kurdish Linguistics II Praesens, Vienna. [Pre-final draft]
Erbach, Kurt and Delan Kheder. 2024. Variation in Countability Properties and Noun Classes. International Journal of Kurdish Studies 10(1). 118-143. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21600/ijoks.1356084
Erbach, Kurt, Benedict Kenyah-Damptey, Leda Berio, Daniel James, Esther Seyffarth. 2023. A comparative corpus study of “race” and “Rasse”. Applied Corpus Linguistics 3(2023). 1-10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100044
Erbach, Kurt and Aviv Schoenfeld. 2022. Object mass nouns and subkind countability. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics (7)1. 1-31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5788
Erbach, Kurt and Leda Berio. 2022. Countability shifts in the normative dimension. in Gutzmann, Daniel & Sophie Repp, Eds. Proceedings of Sinn und Beduetung 26. Universität zu Köln. DOI: 10.18148/sub/2022.v26i0.1001
Erbach, Kurt. 2021. Object Mass Nouns: A Frame Based Analysis. Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf. PhD Dissertation.
Erbach, Kurt, Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip, and Katrin Byrdeck. 2021. Object Mass Nouns as Arbiter for the Mass/Count Category. In Tibor Kiss, Halima Husic, and Francis J. Pelletier (eds.), The Semantics of the Count-Mass Distinction. 167-192. Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108937979.008
Erbach, Kurt. 2020. Predicting object mass nouns across languges. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 5(1). 228-241. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4698.
Erbach, Kurt. 2019. A measure based analysis of plural nouns in Greek. In Espinal, M.T., E. Castroviejo, M. Leonetti, L. McNally, and C. Real-Puigdollers (eds). Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, vol 1. 413-431. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès). DOI: 10.18148/sub/2019.v23i1.541
Erbach, Kurt and Leda Berio. 2019. Readings of Plurals and Common Ground. In E. Pacuit and J. Sikos (eds). At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information, Special Volume of Lecture notes in Computer Science 11667. 21-41. Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_2 (Pre-final draft)
Erbach, Kurt, Peter R. Sutton, and Hana Filip. 2019. Bare nouns and the Hungarian mass/count distinction. In: A. Silva, S. Staton, P. Sutton, C. Umbach (eds.), Language, Logic, and Computation. TbiLLC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 11456. 86-107. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59565-7_5 (Pre-final draft)
Erbach, Kurt. 2018. Fighting for a share of the covers: Accounting for inaccessible readings of plural predicates. In: Sikos, J. (ed). Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2018 Student Session. 197-208.
Erbach, Kurt, Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip, and Katrin Byrdeck. 2017. Object Mass Nouns in Japanese. In: Cremers, A., T. van Gessel, and F. Roelofsen (eds). Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium. 235-244. Link: https://archive.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC2017/Proceedings/index.html
Erbach, Kurt. 2014. Coordinate Systems in Gã. The University of Montana. MA Thesis.

Teaching

Erbach, K. 2025. Introduction to Syntax. Saarland University.
Erbach, K. and R. Gergel 2025. Typology in Linguistics. Saarland University.
Erbach, K. 2024. The History and Development of the English Language. Saarland University.
Erbach, K. 2024. Partitivity in Grammars and Across Dialects. Saarland University.
Erbach, K. 2024. Topics in English Semantics and Pragmatics. Saarland University.
Erbach, K. 2023. Varieties of English. Saarland University.
Erbach, K. 2022. Contrasting Grammars Across Languages. Saarland University.
Erbach, K. 2022. Language and Power. University of Wuerzburg.
Erbach, K. and H. Filip. 2022. Genericity. Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf.
Erbach, K. and P. Maiwald. 2022. Research Methods in Linguistics. University of Wuerzburg.
Erbach, K. 2021. Applied Linguistics. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2021. English Linguistics. University of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2021. Introduction to Semantics. University of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2021. Language in Culture and Cognition: Cross-cultural investigations.
Erbach, K. 2021. Varieties of English. University of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2020. The acquisition of the mass/count distinction. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2020. Corpus Linguistics. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2020. Discourse and Power. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2020. The History of the English Langauge. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2020. Introduction to Semantics. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2020. Language in Culture and Cognition: Speech Acts, Politeness, Discourse. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2020. Methods in Applied Linguistics. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2019. English Linguistics. Universty of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2019. The Mass/Count Distinction, Applied Investigations. University of Bonn.
Erbach, K. 2017. Plurality. Heinrich-Heine-University, Dusseldorf.

Previous appointments

Post-doc, under Yasu Sudo and Clemens Mayr in the IDEAlISM project.
Post-doc, under Jacopo Romoli in Semantics at Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf.
Post-doc, under Carolin Biewer in English Linguistics at Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg.
Lecturer, under Klaus P. Schneider, in English Linguistics at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.
PhD Researcher, under Hana Filip, in Semantics at Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf.

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