Sarah Zobel

Revised Dissertation:

Zobel, Sarah. 2014. Impersonally Interpreted Personal Pronouns. Published online at Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. (SUB download page)

Edited volumes:

• Grosz, Patrick G., Luisa Martí, Hazel Pearson, Yasutada Sudo & Sarah Zobel. 2021. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25, UCL/QMUL.(OJS Uni Konstanz)
• Patel-Grosz, Pritty, Patrick G. Grosz and Sarah Zobel (eds.). 2018. Pronouns in Embedded Contexts, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 99, Springer. (Springer)
• Prinzhorn, Martin, Viola Schmitt and Sarah Zobel (eds.). 2010. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 14, University of Vienna. (OJS Uni Konstanz)

Peer-reviewed articles and proceedings of peer-reviewed conferences:

2024

• Ikoma, Miki, Sarah Zobel, and Takayuki Konishi. 2024. Paralinguistic Information in German Speech: The Presence or Absence of Accent and Phonetic Characteristics of the Particle schon. Proceedings of The Thirty-Eighth General Meeting of the Phonetic Society of Japan: 189-194. (in Japanese)
• Zobel, Sarah. 2024. Restrictions on the Generic Interpretation of Dedicated Impersonal Pronouns. In: Robert Autry et al. (ed.) Proceedings of WCCFL 39, 695-702. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

2023

• Zobel, Sarah. 2023. The Impersonal Use of German 1st Person Singular Ich. Linguistic Inquiry 54(2): 378-394.(Linguistic Inquiry)

2022

• Zobel, Sarah and Jakob Majdić. 2022. How to manage something in Bavarian German: the verbal prefix der-. In: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 26.

2021

• Zobel, Sarah. 2021. Zur Determiniererlosigkeit bei prädikativ verwendeten zählbaren Nomen im Deutschen: Korpusdaten und ihre Konsequenzen. Linguistische Berichte 268: 455-503.
• Zobel, Sarah. 2021. Quantificational variability effects with German größtenteils and implicit agents. In: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25. (PDF)

2020

• Zobel, Sarah. 2020. Exploring the existential semantics of the German impersonal pronoun man in episodic sentences. In: Mariam Asatryan, Yixiao Song und Ayana Whitmal (eds.), NELS 50, Vol. 3, GLSA Amherst. 269--278. (prefinal draft)

2019

• Zobel, Sarah. 2019. Accounting for the "causal link" between free adjuncts and their host clauses. In M. Teresa Espinal et al. (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, vol. 2, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès). 489-506. (PDF)

2018

• Zobel, Sarah. 2018. An analysis of the semantic variability of weak adjuncts and its problems. In: U. Sauerland and S. Solt (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, vol. 2, ZASPiL 61, pp. 499-516. Berlin: ZAS. (PDF)

2017

• Zobel, Sarah. 2017. The restrictive potential of weak adjuncts: nominal 'as'-phrases and individual quantifiers. In Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium. 521-530. (PDF)
• Zobel, Sarah. 2017. The sensitivity of natural language to the distinction between class nouns and role nouns. In Dan Burgdorf, Jacob Collard, Sireemas Maspong, and Brynhildur Stefansdottir (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 27. 438-458. (SALT proceedings)
• Zobel, Sarah and Eva Csipak. 2017. Conditional antecedents containing the German discourse particle 'denn': a corpus study. Linguistica 56: 345-361. (Linguistica)
• Zobel, Sarah. 2017. On the (in)definiteness of impersonal pronouns. Linguistica 56: 363-374. (Linguistica)

2016

• Zobel, Sarah. 2016. A pragmatic analysis of German impersonally used first person singular ich. In Barbara De Cock & Bettina Kluge (eds.) Pragmatics 26: 379-416. (Pragmatics 26)
• Csipak, Eva and Sarah Zobel. 2016. Discourse Particle denn in the Antecedent of Conditionals. In Christopher Pinon (ed.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 11. 31-60. (EISS 11)
• Zobel, Sarah. 2016. Adjectival as-phrases as intensional secondary predicates. In Mary Moroney, Carol-Rose Little, Jacob Collard & Dan Burgdorf (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 26. 284-303. (SALT proceedings)

2015

• Zobel, Sarah. 2015. Voldemort phrases in generic sentences. Grazer Linguistische Studien 83: 107-123. (Pre-final draft)

2014

• Csipak, Eva and Sarah Zobel. 2014. A condition on the distribution of discourse particles across types of questions. In Jyoti Iyer & Leland Kusmer (eds.), NELS 44, Vol. 1. 83--94. GLSA Amherst. (PDF)

2010

• Zobel, Sarah. 2010. Non-Standard Uses of German 1st Person Singular Pronouns. In Kumiyo Nakakoji, Yohei Murakami & E. McCready (eds.), JSAI-isAI, LNAI 6284. 292-311. (Pre-final draft)

Contributions to collective volumes:

• Zobel, Sarah. 2025. The Austrian German discourse particle 'leicht': a version of the discourse particle 'denn'? In Eva Csipak, Johanna David & Mingya Liu (eds.) A Festschrift in Honour of Regine Eckardt, 249-259. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
• Reed, Natasha, Yvonne Metzger, Michaela Kolbe, Sarah Zobel and Margarete Boos. 2018. Unitizing Verbal Interaction Data for Coding: Rules and Reliability. In: Elisabeth Brauner, Margarete Boos & Michaela Kolbe (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Group Interaction Analysis. Cambridge University Press. 208--226.
• Zobel, Sarah. 2017. "'Eh' is eh anders" - 'eh' and 'sowieso' in Federal German and Austrian German. In Clemens Mayr & Edwin Williams (eds.) Themenheft 11-11-17. Festschrift für Martin Prinzhorn. Published as: Wiener Linguistische Gazette 82: 323-330. (WLG 82)

Lexicon articles:

• short articles on count nouns, mass nouns, kind predicates, and indefinite pronouns; longer overview on genericity. In: Band Semantik und Pragmatik, Wörterbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK), edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Turgay and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. (in German)
• approx. 180 lemmas on semantics and semiotics (revision and writing). In: Metzler Lexikon Sprache (6. Auflage), edited by Helmut Glück and Michael Rödel. (in German)

Drafts and manuscripts:

• Miki Ikoma & Sarah Zobel. Prosodie der paralinguistischen Informationen in Bezug auf die betonbare Partikel schon. In: Proceedings der IVG 2025. Submitted.
• Sarah Zobel & Miki Ikoma. Prosodische Merkmale der paralinguistischen Information in Äußerungen mit der Partikel schon. Ms. submitted.
• Sarah Zobel & Eva Csipak. Discourse particles and the connection between conditionals and questions. Ms. in prep.
• Jan Köpping & Sarah Zobel. Two types of existential quantification. Ms. under revision
• Sarah Zobel. A role-based account of the role-specifying use of English predicative as-phrases. Ms. under revision
• Sarah Zobel. The landscape of German predicative als-phrases and English predicative as-phrases. Ms. under revision
• Sarah Zobel. Unstressed überhaupt in wh-questions: Consequences for Rojas-Esponda 2014. Ms. under revision
• Sarah Zobel. On the impersonal use of German personal pronouns. Ms. from 2011 (Draft)
• Sarah Zobel. Embedding Antecedent-Contained Deletion. Ms. from 2009 based on my MA-thesis. (Draft)

Recent talks (selected)

Invited talks

• Generic impersonal pronouns and number. Presented at “Fifteenth International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation”, September 12, 2025, Tskaltubo, Georgia.
• Variation bei Diskurspartikeln: die Partikeln leicht und eh. Presented at Linguistischen Arbeitskreis Bochum (LAB), June 4, 2025, Bochum, Germany.
• On the semantics of German bar-adjectives (with Frank Sode). Presented at ZAS Semantic Circle, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, April 16, 2024, Berlin, Germany.
• The German adverb of quantity größtenteils: quantification over parts. Presented at Oberseminar Linguistik at the Department of English Philology, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, July 11, 2023, Göttingen, Germany.
• Determinerlessness in German predicative nominal expressions. Online presentation at the Syntax and Semantics Colloquium, HU Berlin, January 11, 2022, Berlin, Germany. (Slides)
• Two types of existential quantification (joint talk with Jan Köpping). Online presentation at the Department of Philosophy I, University of Bochum, May 5, 2021, Bochum, Germany. (Slides)
• A third 'man'? On the German impersonal pronoun ‘man’ in speech reports. Presented at the semantics group of Viola Schmitt, HU Berlin, April 22, 2021, Berlin, Germany.
• Two types of existential quantification (joint talk with Jan Köpping). Online presentation at the Semantics Colloquium, University of Frankfurt, January 28, 2021, Frankfurt, Germany.
• How to manage something in Bavarian German: the Bavarian verbal prefix der- (joint talk with Jakob Majdič). Online presentation at RUESHeL Lab Meeting, HU Berlin, December 14, 2020, Berlin, Germany. (Slides)
• Discourse particles and the connection between conditionals and questions (joint talk with Eva Csipak). Online presentation at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), July 5, 2020, Berlin, Germany.
• Ways to talk about individuals: the case of German man in episodic sentences. Video presentation at the Department of Philosophy I, University of Bochum, May 14, 2020, Bochum, Germany.
• The existential use of German man and implicit agents of passives. Presented at the Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, March 4, 2020, Vienna, Austria.
• 'Who dunnit?' The existential implications of impersonal pronouns and implicit agents. Presented at the "21st Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics", March 1, 2020, Szklarska Poreba, Poland.
• Capturing the semantics and pragmatics of impersonal pronominal expressions. Presented at "Variables and the (Meta)semantics of Context-­Sensitivity", September 24, 2019, Vienna, Austria.
• Zu den Lesarten des unpersönlichen Pronomens man. Presented at the Linguistischer Arbeitskreis Köln (LAK), University of Cologne, November 7, 2018, Cologne, Germany. (Slides)
• On the semantic variability of weak adjunct as-phrases. Presented at LingLunch, MIT, October 5, 2017 Boston, MA, USA.
• On the notion of roles in formal semantics. Presented at the LinG Colloquium, University of Göttingen, November 2, 2016, Göttingen, Germany.
• Towards a semantic analysis for German als-phrases. Presented at the semantics colloquium at University of Frankfurt, December 3, 2015, Frankfurt, Germany.
• On the distribution of German discourse particles across types of questions. Presented at the colloquium of the German Department, University of Vienna, March 17, 2015, Vienna, Austria. (Handout)

Conference presentations

• Circumstantial possibility with degrees: the case of German bar-adjectives (with Frank Sode). Presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 30, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, September 16, 2025, Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
• ’#Tidak (se)harusnya khawatir’: On how and why se-...-nya vs. -nya modal forms differ (with Jozina Vander Klok, Hiroki Nomoto, David Moeljadi). Presented at The 28th International Symposium on Malay and Indonesian Linguistics (ISMIL 28), June 9, 2025 Bali, Indonesia.
• Paralinguistic information in German: Pitch accent and phonetic features of the particle schon (in Japanese) (with Miki Ikoma, Takayuki Konishi). Poster presented at Thirty- Eighth General Meeting of the Phonetic Society of Japan, September 29, 2024, Tokyo, Japan.
• Prosodische Merkmale und paralinguistische Information der Partikel schon in Produktion und Wahrnehmung (with Miki Ikoma, Ursula Hirschfeld). Poster presented at Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik 2024, September 12, 2024, Dresden, Germany.
• The morphosyntax of MODAL-nya forms in Indonesian: The case for adverbs (with Jozina vander Klok, Hiroki Nomoto, David Moeljadi). Presented at The 27th International Symposium on Malay and Indonesian Linguistics (ISMIL 27), National University of Singapore, June 6, 2024, Singapore, Singapore.
• Sufferability as a grammatically relevant notion: the German derivational suffix -bar (with Frank Sode). Presented at Semantics and Philosophy in Europe 12, Université Côte d’Azur, October 13, 2023, Nice, France.
• Expressing difficult achievements in Bavarian: the interpretation of der-verbs (with Jakob Majdič). Presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 26, Cologne University, September 10, 2021 Cologne, Germany. (Video of the presentation)
• Restrictions on the generic interpretation of dedicated impersonal pronouns. Poster presented at 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, University of Arizona, April 9, 2021, Tucson, AZ, USA.
• Quantificational variability effects with German größtenteils and implicit agents. Presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 25, University College London / Queen Mary University of London, September 3-9, 2020, London, UK. (Video of the presentation)
• A non-existential analysis for the German impersonal pronoun man in episodic sentences. Presented at NELS 50 at MIT, October 25, 2019, Cambridge, MA, USA. (Poster)
• Accounting for the causal link between free adjuncts and their host clauses. Presented at the 23rd Sinn und Bedeutung, September 7, 2018, Barcelona, Spain.
• On the difference between the Federal German and the Austrian German discourse particle eh: An experimental investigation. Presented at Linguistic Evidence 2018, February 17, 2018, Tuebingen, Germany. (Slides)
• The restrictive potential of weak adjuncts: nominal as-phrases and individual quantifiers. Presented at the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, December 22, 2017, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
• Capturing the interpretational possibilities of weak free adjuncts. Presented at the 22nd Sinn und Bedeutung, September 7, 2017, Berlin/Potsdam, Germany.
• The notion of roles and the role use of English nominal as-phrases. Poster presented at SALT 27 (University of Maryland), May 13, College Park, ML, USA.
• Talking about yesterday - postnominal temporal adverbs in the German prefield (with Eva Csipak). Presented at Event Semantics 2016 (University of Düsseldorf), November 25-26, 2016, Düsseldorf, Germany. (Slides)
• Adjectival as-phrases as intensional secondary predicates. Poster presented at SALT 26 (University of Texas at Austin), May 13, 2016 Austin, TX, USA.
• On a use of German discourse particle denn in the antecedent of conditionals (joint talk with Eva Csipak). Presented at SinFonIJA VIII (Ljubljana University), September 25, 2015, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Workshop presentations

• Prosodie der paralinguistischen Informationen im Bezug auf die betonbare Partikel schon (with Miki Ikoma). Presented at IVG-Kongress 2025, S17: Phonetik & Phonologie, July 25, 2025, Graz, Austria.
• Bavarian complex der-verbs and temporal adverbials (joint talk with Jakob Majdič). Presented at Event Semantics 2020, University of Tübingen, November 7, 2020, Tübingen, Germany. (Slides)
• Microvariation at the not at-issue level: Federal German vs. Austrian German eh. Presented at Microvariation in Semantics, (SuB satellite event at ZAS Berlin), September 6, 2017 Berlin, Germany.
• Discourse particles and the connection between conditionals and questions (with Eva Csipak). Presented at Conditionals at the crossroads of semantics and pragmatics, University of Konstanz, November 11, 2016 Konstanz, Germany. (Slides)
• Discourse particles and their connection to sentence types, speech acts, and discourse (with Eva Csipak). Presented at Formal Approaches to Particles at the ESSLLI 2016 (University Bozen/Bolzano), August 26, 2016 Bolzano, Italy. (Slides)