Field of Work
Prof. Daniel Hole’s research focus areas include syntax and semantics, i.e. the structure of language and the theory of meaning and association that arises from this structure. One of the aspects he investigates is event structure, i.e. the question of how sentence parts go together to form successive descriptions of increasingly complex events. Another area of interest is information structure, i.e. how the meaning of a sentence is influenced by the arrangement of information or emphasis. In addition to German, Hole’s also works with Chinese and Vietnamese.
As part of SFB 732, Hole directed a project on the subject “Alternations and bindings” which focus on so-called “remarkable” linguistic constructions. The research results generated from this “non-canonical data” – such as constructions which cannot be unambiguously classified, under-researched languages and language varieties, “unadjusted” texts and spontaneous language dialogs –are used to create hypotheses which are tested based on data from web corpora, for example.
Personal Information
Prof. Daniel Hole has been the director of the Institute of German Studies and Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart since October 2013. A linguist and a scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, Hole was born in Berlin in 1969. He studied linguistics, phonetics and philosophy in Munich and Cologne and also Chinese in Taipeh, Taiwan. In 2001 he obtained his doctorate at the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on “The grammar of focus quantification in Mandarin Chinese”. He wrote his habilitation thesis in 2008 at the Humboldt University of Berlin on the subject of the free datives and variable binding in German.
Hole previously held a stand-in professorship at the University of Stuttgart from 2008 to 2010 (chair held by Prof. Klaus von Heusinger) as well as occupying an interim post at the University of Cologne (chair held by Prof. Beatrice Primus) prior to his current appointment. Formerly a Heisenberg scholarship holder of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Hole is an expert consultant to numerous journals and research organizations.