Prof. Dr. Thomas Berg
Professor for Linguistics
English Linguistics
Address
Universität Hamburg
Faculty of Humanities
Department of Language, Literature, and Media II
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Überseering 35
22297 Hamburg
Office
Room: 07072
Office hours
Contact
Tel: +49 40 42838-4848
Key aspects of activity
- Psycholinguistics
- Phonology
- Contrastive Linguistics
- Morphology
Academic Career
- born 1957 in Lüneburg
- Studied: English and Romanee Languages in Kiel, Braunschweig, Hull (England)
- 2nd State Examination in Speyer
- Ph.D in Braunschweig 1986 with a thesis entitled "Die Abbildung des Sprachproduktionsprozesses in einem Aktivationsflußmodell"
- Habilitation in Oldenburg 1995 with a thesis entitled "Linguistic structure and change: An explanation from language processing"
- Professorial teaching duties at the University of Duisburg 1996/97
- Professor at the University of Hamburg since 1997
Main Research Interests
- Psycholinguistics
- Phonology
- Comparative Linguistics
- Morphology
Publications
Monographs
- A cross-linguistic comparison of slips of the tongue. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1987.
- Die Abbildung des Sprachproduktionsprozesses in einem Aktivationsflußmodell. Untersuchungen an deutschen und englischen Versprechern. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988.
- Linguistic structure and change: An explanation from language processing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. (slightly revised paperback edition, 2001)
- Structure in language. A dynamic perspective. New York: Routledge, 2009. (paperback edition, 2012)
- Anglistische Sprachwissenschaft. Munich: Fink, 2013.
Edited volumes
- (with Hubert Cuyckens, Klaus-Uwe Panther & René Dirven): Motivation in language. Studies in honour of Günter Radden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003.
- (with Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke & Peter Siemund): Aspects of meaning construction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007.
Essays and Articles
- Is voice a suprasegmental? in: Linguistics 23 (1985) 885-915.
- The aftermath of error occurrence: Psycholinguistic evidence from cut-offs. in: Language & Communication 6 (1986) 195-213.
- Sprachliche Ausrutscher als Glücksfall für die Wissenschaft. in: Spektrum der Wissenschaft (November 1986) 39-40.
- The monophonematic status of diphthongs revisited. in: Phonetica 43 (1986) 198-205.
- The problems of language control: Editing, monitoring, and feedback. in: Psychological Research 48 (1986) 133-144.
- The case against accommodation: Evidence from German speech error data. in: Journal of Memory and Language 26 (1987) 277-299.
- The whys and wherefores of suprasegmentalization. in: Lingua 74 (1988) 283-302.
- Zur Leistungsfähigkeit linguistischer Konstrukte in der Beschreibung psycholinguistischer Daten: Untersuchungen an phonologischen Versprechern aus mehreren indoeuropäischen Sprachen. in: Bernd Spillner (Hg.): Angewandte Linguistik und Computer. Kongreßberichte zur 18. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik. Tübingen: Narr, 1988. 197-199.
- On the internal structure of polysyllabic monomorphemic words: The case for superrimes. in: Studia Linguistica 43 (1989) 5-32.
- How phonetic is a phonological feature representation? The case of labio-dental fricatives. in: Speech Communication 8 (1989) 329-346.
- Intersegmental cohesiveness. in: Folia Linguistica 23 (1989) 245-280.
- The differential sensitivity of consonants and vowels to stress. in: Language Sciences 12 (1990) 65-84.
- Unreine Reime als Evidenz für die Organisation phonologischer Merkmale. in: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 9 (1990) 3-27.
- Redundant-feature coding in the mental lexicon. in: Linguistics 29 (1991) 903-925.
- Phonological processing in a syllable-timed language with pre-final stress: Evidence from Spanish speech error data. in: Language and Cognitive Processes 6 (1991) 265-301.
- Productive and perceptual constraints on speech error correction. in: Psychological Research 54 (1992) 114-126.
- Phonological harmony as a processing problem. in: Journal of Child Language 19 (1992) 225-257.
- Umrisse einer psycholinguistischen Theorie der Silbe. in: Peter Eisenberg, Karl Heinz Ramers & Heinz Vater (Hg.): Silbenphonologie des Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr, 1992, 44-99.
- Prelexical and postlexical features in language production: in: Applied Psycholinguistics 13 (1992) 199-235.
- (with Ulrich Schade): The role of inhibition in a spreading-activation model of language production. I: The psycholinguistic perspective. in: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 21 (1992) 405-434.
- (with Ulrich Schade): The role of inhibition in a spreading-activation model of language production. II: The implementational perspective. in: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 21 (1992) 435-462.
- The phoneme through a psycholinguist’s looking-glass. in: Theoretical Linguistics 19 (1993) 39-76.
- On the relationship between voice and word class in English. in: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 41 (1993) 198-212.
- The sensitivity of phonological rimes to phonetic length. in: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 19 (1994) 63-81.
- More on intersegmental cohesiveness. in: Folia Linguistica 28 (1994) 257-278.
- Word-final devoicing in the history of English: A case of unnatural phonology? in: English Studies 76 (1995) 185-201.
- Sound change in child language: A study of inter-word variation. in: Language and Speech 38 (1995) 331-363.
- (with Hassan Abd-El-Jawad): The unfolding of suprasegmental representations: A cross-linguistic perspective. in: Journal of Linguistics 32 (1996) 291-324.
- Language processing as a reason for linguistic structure and change. in: English and American Studies in German (1996) 9 - 12.
- The modality-specificity of linguistic representations: Evidence from slips of the tongue and the pen. in: Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 671-697.
- Lexical-stress differences in English and German. in: Linguistische Berichte 167 (1997) 3 - 22.
- The resolution of number conflicts in English and German agreement patterns. in: Linguistics 36 (1998) 41 - 70.
- The (in)compatibility of word classes and morpheme orders and its historical implications. in: English Language and Linguistics 2 (1998) 245 - 262.
- Stress variation in British and American English. in: World Englishes 18 (1999) 123 - 143.
- (with Ulrich Schade): A local connectionist account of consonant harmony in child language. in: Cognitive Science 24 (2000) 123-149
- The position of adjectives on the noun-verb continuum. in: English Language and Linguistics 4 (2000)
- (with Jussi Niemi) Syllabification in Finnish and German: Onset filling versus onset maximization. in: Journal of Phonetics 28 (2000) 187 -216
- An experimental study of syllabification in Icelandic. in: Nordic Journal of Linguistics 24 (2001), 71 - 105.
- The historical development of English sentence structure: from less to more hierarchical. in: Wolfram Bublitz, Manfred von Roncador und Heinz Vater (eds.): Philology, typology and language structure. Festschrift for Winfried Boeder. Frankfurt, M.: Peter Lang, (2003), 111-136.
- Slips of the typewriter key. in: Applied Psycholinguistics 23 (2002), 185 - 207.
- Die Analyse von Sprechfehlern. in: Theo Herrmann & Joachim Grabowski (eds.): Sprachproduktion. (Enzyklopädie der Psychologie). Göttingen: Hogrefe (2003), 247-264.
- Similarity and contrast in segmental phonology. in: Linguistics 42 (2004), 1049 - 1103.
- (with Ulrich Schade and Uwe Laubenstein) Versprecher und ihre Reparaturen. in: Gert Rickheit, Theo Herrmann und Werner Deutsch (eds.): Psycholinguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (2003), 317 - 338.
- Right-branching in English derivational morphology. in: English Language and Linguistics 7 (2003) , 279 - 307.
- Shared lexical representations: evidence from first-language acquisition. in: Rivista di Linguistica 16 (2004), 245 - 268.
- A structural account of phonological paraphasias. in: Brain and Language 94 (2005), 104 - 129.
- The internal structure of four-noun compounds in English and German. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2 (2006) 197-231.
- A typology of suprasegmental structure. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 53 (2007), 53-73.
- Emphatic stress shift in German. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 27 (2008), 165-187.
- (with Christian Koops): The interplay of left- and right-branching effects: A phonotactic analysis of Korean syllable structure. in: Lingua 120 (2010), 35 - 49.
- A diachronic frequency account of the allomorphy of some grammatical markers. in: Journal of Linguistics 47 (2011), 31-64.
- The clipping of common and proper nouns. in: Word Structure 4, (2011) 1-19.
- The modification of compounds by attributive adjectives. in: Language Sciences 33 (2011), 725-737.
- Recursion introduces a left-branching bias (where possible). in: Linguistics 49 (2011), 977- 990.
- (with Sabine Helmer, Marion Neubauer and Arne Lohmann): Determinants of the extent of compound use: A contrastive analysis: in: Linguistics 50 (2012) 269-303.
- The cohesiveness of English and German compounds. in: The Mental Lexicon 7 (2012) 1-33.
- Branching direction in recursive structures. in: English Language and Linguistics 16 (2012) 385-401.
- On the complementary nature of consonant and vowel harmony in child and adult language. Word 59 (2008) 241-256.
- (with Marion Neubauer): From unit-and-ten to ten-before-unit order in the history of English numerals. in: Language Variation and Change 26 (2014) 21-43.
- How nominal compounds are modified by two adjectives. in: Folia Linguistica 48 (2014) 1-36.
- On the relationship between type and token frequency. in: Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 21 (2014) 199-222.
- Competition as a unifying concept for the study of language. in: The Mental Lexicon 9 (2014) 338-370.
- Boundary permeability - A parameter for linguistic typology. in: Linguistic Typology 18 (2014) 489 - 531.
- (with Christian Koops): Phonotactic constraints and sub-syllabic structure: A difficult relationship. in: Journal of Linguistics 51 (2015) 3-39.
- Locating affixes on the lexicon-grammar continuum. in: Cognitive Linguistic Studies 2 (2015) 150-180.
- The multiplanar nature of frequency. in: Glottotheory 7 (2016) 1-19.
- The semantic structure of English and German compounds: Same or different. in: Studia Neophilologica 88 (2016) 148-164.
- Compounding in German and English: A quantitative translation study. in: Languages in Contrast 17 (2017) 43-68.
- The modification of compound nouns by three adjectives. in: Functions of Language 24 (2017) 139-165.
- Frequency and serial order. in: Linguistics 56 (2018) 1303-1351.
- Towards an explanation of the syntax of West Germanic particle verbs: A cognitive-pragmatic view. in: Cognitive Linguistics 29 (2018) 703 - 728.
- Adjective phrases with doubly modified heads: how lexical information influences word order and constituent structure. in: English Language and Linguistics 23 (2019) 341-361.
- (with Tim Zingler and Arne Lohmann): The range of linguistic units: Distance effects in English mandative subjunctive constructions. in: Journal of Linguistics 56 (2020) 231-268.
- Asymmetrical intercalation in Germanic complex verbs. in: Journal of Germanic Linguistics 32 (2020) 107-144.
- Morphological slips of the tongue. in: Vito Pirelli, Ingo Plag & Wolfgang U. Dressler (eds.): Word knowledge and word usage: a cross-disciplinary guide to the mental lexicon. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 634-679 (2020).
- Ordering biases in cross-linguistic perspective: The interaction of serial order and structural level. in: Linguistic Typology 24 (2020) 353-397.
- Nominal and pronominal gender: Putting Greenberg's Universal 43 to the test. Language Typology and Universals 73 (2020) 525-574.
- The typology of adjective linkage: Relating NPs to VPs. in: Language 96 (2020) 551-577.
Book Reviews
- Rev. of: Eric Keller: Introduction aux systèmes psycholinguistiques. Chicoutimi: Gaëtan Morin, 1985. in: Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36 (1985) 143-147.
- Rev. of: Donald G. MacKay: The organization of perception and action. A theory for language and other cognitive skills. New York: Springer, 1987. in: Current Psychology: Research and Reviews 8 (1989) 56-60.
- Rev. of: Jean Aitchison: Words in the mind. An introduction to the mental lexicon. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. in: Lingua 79 (1989) 342-346.
- Rev. of: Willem J.M. Levelt: Speaking. From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. in: American Journal of Psychology 103 (1990) 409-418.
- Rev. of: Theo Vennemann: Preference laws for syllable structure and the explanation of sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988. in: Journal of Linguistics 26 (1990) 569-570.
- Rev. of: David Lee: Language, children and society. An introduction to linguistics and language development. New York: New York University Press, 1989. in: Lingua 83 (1991) 255-260.
- Rev. of: David Ingram: First language acquisition. Method, description and explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. in: Lingua 85 (1991) 55-60.
- Rev. of: Marlis Hellinger: Kontrastive feministische Linguistik. Mechanismen sprachlicher Diskriminierung im Englischen und Deutschen. Ismaning: Hueber, 1990. in: Linguistische Berichte 137 (1992) 68-74.
- Rev. of: Jean-Luc Nespoulous & Pierre Villiard (eds.): Morphology, phonology, and aphasia. New York: Springer, 1990. in: Linguistics 30 (1992) 458-467.
- Rev. of: Natalie Lefkowitz: Talking backwards, looking forwards. The French language game Verlan. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. in: Language in Society 23 (1992) 503-508.
- Rev. of: Monika Schwarz: Einführung in die kognitive Linguistik. Tübingen: Francke, 1992. in: Sprache und Kognition 11 (1992) 245-248.
- Rev. of: Siegfried Wyler: Colour and language. Colour terms in English. Tübingen: Narr, 1992. in: English Studies 75 (1994) 382-384.
- Rev. of: John A. Hawkins: A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. in: Linguistics 34 (1996) 1247-1253.
- Rev. of: Nikolaus Ritt: Selfish sounds and linguistic evolution. A Darwinian approach to language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. in: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 26 (2007), 131-132.
- Rev. of: Laurel J. Brinton & Donna M. Brinton: The linguistic structure of Modern English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2010. Anglistik 22 (2011) 217-219.
- Rev. of: Elena Even-Simkin & Yishai tobin: The regularity of the 'iregular' verbs and nouns in English, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2013. Journal of Linguistics 50 (2014).