Kurt Erbach

I am currently researcher and lecturer working on nominal semantics, focusing on changes in partitivity in historical and present day varieties of English. I am currently working on my Habilitation under Remus Gergel, in English Linguistics at Saarland University. I am also the manager of the University of Frankfurt Semantics Laboratory under Cornelia Ebert.

My long term goal is refining notions of semantic complexity to better understand how language 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 anti-discrimination language research, and am currently participating in the project A comparitive corpus study of “race” and “Rasse”, which aims to investigate anti-racist language use and language policy.

My research projects are listed below, as are my publications and courses. You can find additional content on my Mastodon page.

Previous appointments

Projects

Partitivity in English.

  • Direct pseudo-partitives in American English, with Remus Gergel (Paper submitted).
  • Partitives in the Grammatical History Germanic Languages, with Johanna Wood (Paper in prep).

Countability in English.

  • Diachronic analyses.
  • Countability in present Day Englishes.
    • Countability shifts in the normative dimension, with Leda Berio (Paper).
    • Counting and categorizing: The relationship between the mass/count distinction and thought, with Leda Berio, (Slides).
    • Varieties of mass/count interpretation of hybrid nouns, with Yasu Sudo (Abstract).

Countability across Languages.

  • Sorani Kurdish
    • Countability in Sorani Kurdish, with Delan Kheder (Abstract).
    • The count-mass distinction in Sorani Kurdish (Paper under review).
  • Romanian
    • Syntactic versus semantic countability categories, with Alyssa Löffler (Paper in prep).
  • Greek
    • Object mass nouns in Greek, with Vasileia Skrimpa (Abstract).
    • A measure based analysis of plural nouns in Greek (Paper).
  • Hungarian
  • Japanese
  • Predicting object mass nouns across languges (Paper).

Plural predication.

  • 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).

The concept of race in (US-American) English and (German) German.

Publications

Teaching

  • 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.