Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

• Zobel, Sarah (2025). The Austrian German discourse particle leicht: a version of the discourse particle denn?. In: A Festschrift in Honour of Regine Eckardt. 249-259. https://doi.org/10.18452/33394
• Zobel, Sarah (2023). The impersonal use of German 1st person singular ich. Linguistic Inquiry, 54(2), 378-394.
•  Zobel, Sarah and Jakob Majdić (2022). How to manage something in Bavarian German: the verbal prefix der-. Sinn und Bedeutung 26.
• Zobel, Sarah (2022). Restrictions on the Generic Interpretation of Dedicated Impersonal Pronouns. In: Proceedings of WCCFL 39.
• 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)
• Zobel, Sarah (2021). The Impersonal Use of German 1st Person Singular Ich. Linguistic Inquiry (Online first).(Linguistic Inquiry)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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 (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)
• 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. "'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)
• 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)
• 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)
• Zobel, Sarah (2015). Voldemort phrases in generic sentences. Grazer Linguistische Studien 83: 107-123. (Pre-final draft)
• Zobel, Sarah. 2014. Impersonally Interpreted Personal Pronouns. Published online at Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. (SUB download page)
• 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)
• 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)

Vorträge

• 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.

My research interests encompass different topics that fall into the areas of semantics and pragmatics proper, are located at the syntax-semantics interface, or are connected to the philosophy of language. I am especially drawn to the less well-studied uses/interpretations of linguistic expressions: they force us to re-evaluate previous analyses of the better studied/standard interpretations of these expressions, and they lead to a better understanding of the connection between semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces.

Methodologically, I am interested in corpus linguistic and experimental methods and how they can be applied fruitfully to semantic and pragmatic research. Most of my theoretical work is informed by corpus data and/or experimental studies.

• Dedicated impersonal pronouns and impersonally used (singular) personal pronouns
• German als-phrases and English as-phrases
• German discourse particles
• The Bavarian verbal prefix der-