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About me

I am a Professor of Linguistics, specializing in "Variation and Variability in morphosyntactic/morphological systems", at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam, and co-director of the The Potsdam Morpho-Syntax Lab (with Martin Salzmann). I received my PhD in 2014 from Leipzig University. Before coming to Potsdam as an assistant professor in 2016, I spent the academic year 2015/16 as a maître de conférence at the ENS, Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. I study the syntactic and morphological properties of language from a cross-linguistic perspective with a focus on non-Indo-European languages in order to uncover the limits of variability in language ((im)possible patterns, parameters of variation). My major aim is to use empirical observations to understand the structural aspects of the grammar of human language and to advance formal theories of grammar. How to pronounce my name: /do.'ʁeːn ge.'ʔɔɐ.gi/.
I have been the spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center 1287 The Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational, and Grammatical Aspects since October 2022, and the head of the CRC's internal research training group since 2021. I am also a member of the scientific advisory board of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS, since 2023), and a member of the editorial board of Cambridge Elements in Generative Syntax (CUP).

Areas of interest:

• case and agreement (differential argument encoding, case stacking, scale effects, syntactic vs. semantic agreement, interactions of movement and agreement)
• dependency formation (movement vs. base-generation vs. prolepsis, postsyntactic operations)
• locality (islands, long movement, switch reference, non-local case assignment, reflexes of movement, resumption, islands)
• extraction asymmetries (sharing constructions such as ATB-movement, subjects vs. non-subjects)
• NP-syntax (possession, DP vs. NP)
• grammatical function changing (possessor raising, inverse, passive)
• the nature and interaction of elementary morphosyntactic operations (rule ordering, derivation vs. representation)
• mismatches at the syntax-morphology-interface (portmanteaux, allomorphy, multiple exponence, syncretim etc.)

Team

The Potsdam Morpho-Syntax Lab