Sarah Zobel

sarahzobel I am a linguist at the Department of German Studies at Leibniz University of Hanover, specializing in formal semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces, as well as experimental and corpus linguistic methods in these areas.

 

 

My current research interests in theoretical semantics and pragmatics:

  • discourse particles and their contributions inside questions and antecedents of conditionals
  • semantics of German adverbs of quantity, specifically größtenteils
  • impersonal pronouns and non-referential uses of personal pronouns in connection with genericity
  • semantics of German deverbal adjectives formed with -bar
  • syntax and semantics of Indonesian necessity modals
  • accent and prosodic patterns of the particle schon

In addition to my theoretical work, I am interested in corpus linguistic and experimental methods and how they can be applied fruitfully to semantic and pragmatic research and how they can inform theoretical considerations. A further interest of mine is regional and dialectal variation, which I aim to integrate in my theoretical and empirical investigations.

Last modified: 2025-11-06 18:00:00+01:00
Latest article

Restrictions on the Generic Interpretation of Dedicated Impersonal Pronouns.
Zobel, Sarah. 2024. Restrictions on the Generic Interpretation of Dedicated Impersonal Pronouns. In: Robert Autry et al. (ed.) Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics.

Recent presentations
  • @ Sinn und Bedeutung 30: bar-adjectives
  • @ IVG 2025: accent placement and prosody of schon
  • @ ISMIL 28: Indonesian NYA-modals vs SE-NYA-modals
Recent teaching
  • Winter 25: SE Academic German: NPs
  • Winter 25: SE Multilingualism & typology
  • Winter 25: Intro Linguistics