Elisabeth Stark

Elisabeth Stark holds a chair in Romance Linguistics at the University of Zurich (UZH). After having been a full professor in Romance Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin (2004-2008), she did her habilitation on indefinites in Old Italian (2003) and her doctorate on word order issues in spoken French (1996) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich). Her core interests are the comparative morphosyntax of Romance nominals and micro-variation in French (register variation), from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, and integrating variationist and formal approaches to language.

She has published in journals such as Linguistic variation, Journal of Semantics, Linguistics and Probus; she is member of the scientific boards of Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Lingvisticae Investigationes and Langages and of the book series Linguistische Arbeiten at Mouton de Gruyter and Orbus Romanicus at Narr. Since 2011, she has been the director of two big interdisciplinary research projects (grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation) on multilingual variation in WhatsApp messages and text messages. In 2018-2021, she is co-directing an international project (SNSF, DFG) on partitive articles in minor Romance languages (with Cecilia Poletto, Frankfurt/Padua), and from 2020 onwards she will be responsible for a newly approved large research infrastructure for language-related research on a national level (“LiRI”) at UZH. She is co-director of the Zurich Center for Linguistics and co-director of the URPP “Language and Space” at UZH. She was elected a member of AcademiaNet in 2012.

 

Relevant publications:

  • Haegeman, Liliane & Stark, Elisabeth (accepted). Register-specific subject omission in English and French and the syntax of coordination. In: Sam Wolfe & Christine Meklenborg Salvensen (Eds.), Germanic and Romance: Continuity and Variation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Stark, Elisabeth & Robert-Tissot, Aurélia (2017a). Subject drop in French text messages. Linguistic variation 17(2), 251-271. (Register Variation and Syntactic Theory, special issue edited by Diane Massam and Tim Stowell). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14020.sta.
  • Ueberwasser, Simone & Stark, Elisabeth (2017b). What’s up, Switzerland? A corpus-based research project in a multilingual country. Linguistik Online 84(5), 105-126. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.84.3849.
  • Stark, Elisabeth (2014). Frequency, Form and Function of Cleft Constructions in the Swiss SMS Corpus. In: Anna-Maria de Cesare (Ed.), Frequency, Form and Function of cleft constructions (pp. 325-344). Berlin/Munich/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110361872.325.
  • Stark, Elisabeth (2013a). Clitic subjects in French text messages: Does technical change provoke and/or reveal linguistic change? In: Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh & Jan Lindschouw (Eds.), Deixis and Pronouns in Romance Languages (pp. 147-169). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
  • Stark, Elisabeth & Riedel, Isabelle (2013b). L’accord du participe passé dans les SMS francophones du corpus SMS Suisse. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 63(1), 116-138.
  • Dufter, Andreas & Stark, Elisabeth (2002). La variété des variétés: combien de dimensions pour la description? Quelques réflexions à partir du français. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 53, 81-108. DOI: 10.1515/9783110179590.81.
  • Stark, Elisabeth (1997). Voranstellungsstrukturen und topic-Markierung im Französischen. Mit einem Ausblick auf das Italienische. Tübingen: Narr (= Romanica Monacensia, 51).