Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Nikolaus Ritt

Consultation hours: Tue 4-5pm

Summer term 2026

120225 SE MA Seminar - Focus: Historical Linguistics / Linguistics Seminar - Constraints on and changes in the productivity in word formation

128304 AR Philosophy of Language Science

Summer term 2025

122030 VO History of English

122220 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper

128123 AR Structural Analysis

128141 FS FS Research Seminar I / II - Morphonotactics

128304 AR Philosophy of Language Science

Ritt, N. (2024). Sound change, naturalness, and the identifiability of word-forms. Manuscript submitted for publication. In W. U. Dressler, K. Dziubalska-Koɫaczyk, & P. Donegan (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Natural Linguistics Cambridge University Press.

Böhm, I. A., Ritt, N., & Matzinger, T. (Accepted/In press). Sound changes are selected by a bias against morphotactic ambiguity. Journal of Historical Linguistics.

Ritt, N., & Baumann, A. (2023). Doing Natural Linguistics the evolutionary way: Concepts and methods. Manuscript submitted for publication. In K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, P. J. Donegan, & W. U. Dressler (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Natural Linguistics Cambridge University Press.

Ritt, N., & Hofmann, K. (2023). SPEAM User Manual: Purpose, Description, and User Instructions. Web publication https://osf.io/9sgv4/

Ritt, N., & Hofmann, K. (2023). SPEAM: An agent based model of stress pattern evolution. Software or database https://osf.io/9sgv4/

Ritt, N. (2023). Markedness, Naturalness and Complexity. Manuscript submitted for publication. In E. Aldridge, A. Breitbarth, K. E. Kiss, A. Ledgeway, J. Salmons, & A. Simonenko (Eds.), Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic Linguistics Wiley-Blackwell.

Ritt, N. (Accepted/In press). Collocational reflexes of gender binarism in published books have become less pronounced during the last 200 years. VIEW[Z] : Vienna English working papers, 31. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365317127_Collocational_reflexes_of_gender_binarism_in_published_books_have_become_less_pro-_nounced_during_the_last_200_years

Fabiszak, M., Ritt, N., & Wacker, E. (2022). A Historical Dynamic Approach to Metaphor. Language, Mind, Culture, Society, 6, 68-95.

Matzinger, T., & Ritt, N. (2022). Phonotactically probable word shapes represent attractors in the cultural evolution of sound patterns. Cognitive Linguistics, 33(2), 415-446. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2021-0087

Matzinger, T., Ritt, N., & Fitch, W. T. S. (2021). The Influence of Different Prosodic Cues on Word Segmentation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 622042. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.622042

Matzinger, T., Specker, E., Ritt, N., & Fitch, W. T. S. (2021). Aesthetic perception of prosodic patterns as a factor in speech segmentation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43, 2992-2998. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tm94762

Ritt, N., Baumann, A., Zöpfl, A., & Zehentner, E. (2020). Reconsidering subjectification from the perspective of animal signalling. Evolutionary Linguistic Theory, 2(2), 138-152. https://doi.org/10.1075/elt.00020.rit

Matzinger, T., Ritt, N., & Fitch, W. T. S. (2020). Non-native speaker pause patterns closely correspond to those of native speakers at different speech rates. PLoS ONE, 15(4), Article e0230710. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230710

Baumann, A., Prömer, C., & Ritt, N. (2020). Reconstructing the diffusion of Middle English schwa deletion. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 32(1), 191-210.

Ritt, N., Baumann, A., & Prömer, C. (2020). The fall and rise of English any. In P. Núñez-Pertejo, M. J. López-Couso, B. Méndez-Naya, & J. Pérez-Guerra (Eds.), Crossing Linguistic Boundaries: Systemic, Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in English (pp. 61-80). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Ritt, N. (Ed.) (2019). Diachronic Phonotactics. De Gruyter Mouton. Folia Linguistica Historica: acta societatis linguisticae Europaeae Vol. 40 No. 1

Ritt, N. (2019). Introduction. Folia Linguistica Historica, 53(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1515/flih-2019-0001

Baumann, A., Prömer, C., & Ritt, N. (2019). Word form shapes are selected to be morphotactically indicative. Folia Linguistica Historica, 53(1), 129-151. https://doi.org/10.1515/flih-2019-0007

Fehér, O., Ritt, N., & Smith, K. (2019). Asymmetric accommodation during interaction leads to the regularisation of linguistic variants. Journal of Memory and Language, 109(109), Article 104036. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104036

Baumann, A., & Ritt, N. (2018). The basic reproductive ratio as a link between acquisition and change in phonotactics. Cognition, 176, 174-183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.005

Research interests

English linguistics
History of English
Phonology, Morphology, Morphonology,
Middle English, Early Modern English

Linguistic theory
Language as a historical system
Language and identity
Language transmission and evolution
Memetics
Complex adaptive systems and generalized Darwinism
Connectionist competence modeling
Language and cognition
Evolutionary epistemology
Constructivism

CV

1978-1985	Student of English and German Philology at the University of Vienna
January1985	Graduation to Magister Philosophiae (Mag. Phil.)
March 1985	Promotion to University Assistant (English Department, Vienna University)
1985/86	Teacher Training at a Viennese Grammar School
1987/88	Foreign Language Lecturer (German), Durham University
June1990	Graduation to Doctor Philosophiae (Dr. Phil.)
1991	Community Service at a Neurological Clinic in Gugging, Lower Austria
1992	(Summer term) Visiting Professor, Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest
April 1994	Promotion to Assistant Professor
1994-2000	Work on Habilitation Thesis on an evolutionary framework for the study of linguistic history
2001	Venia Docendi for English Linguistics, Promotion to Associate Professor
Nov 2001-Jan 2002	Visiting Professor, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan
Oct 2002-Jan 2005	Head of the English Department of Vienna University
Oct-Nov 2006	Visiting Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela
Jan 2007	Visiting Fellow, University of Edinburgh
October 2004-2012	Vice-Dean of the Faculty for Philological and Cultural Studies
February 2009	Professor for English Historical Linguistics, University of Vienna
Oct 2016-Oct 2018	Head of the English Department of Vienna University

The rise of present participial -ing in Middle English: Reducing ambiguity in word structure signals

van de Bilt, M. (Speaker), Jung, F. (Speaker), Hupertz, M. (Contributor), Böhm, I. A. (Contributor) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

7 Dec 2025

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Human language: is it unique?

Matzinger, T. (Speaker), Ritt, N. (Speaker), Dressler, W. (Speaker), Cohn, N. (Speaker), Hickey, R. (Speaker), Ravignani, A. (Speaker) & Wrembel, M. (Speaker)

24 Sept 2025

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Balancing similarity and distinctiveness: Competing pressures in the evolution of English monosyllables

Böhm, I. A. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

16 Sept 2025

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Complex sound sequences as (un)ambiguous signals of word structure: Experimental and corpus approaches

Böhm, I. A. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

27 Aug 2025

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

An agent-based simulation of constraint interaction in the evolution of word stress

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

9 Sept 2024

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Morphotactically indicative sound shapes are learnt more easily in artificial language learning experiments

Böhm, I. A. (Speaker), Smith, K. (Contributor) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

9 Sept 2024

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Are dispreferred sound sequences learnt better when they predictably indicate morphotactic structure?

Böhm, I. A. (Speaker), Smith, K. (Contributor) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

21 Aug 2024

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Word Stress Evolution in an Agent Based Model

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

15 Dec 2023

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Marked Coda Clusters are learnt more easily when they are morphonotactic

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Böhm, I. A. (Speaker)

15 Sept 2023

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

‘Chained to the rhythm’: Using agent-based simulation to model the evolution of stress pattern diversity in English

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Hofmann, K. (Speaker)

5 Sept 2023

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Sound changes tend to reduce morphotactic ambiguity

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Böhm, I. A. (Speaker)

5 Sept 2023

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

An agent-based modeling approach to the evolution of stress pattern diversity in English

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Hofmann, K. (Speaker)

8 Aug 2023

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

An agent-based-modeling approach to Middle English stress placement

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Hofmann, K. (Speaker)

6 Dec 2022

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Morphotactic ambiguity affects the evolution of irregular past tense and participle forms ending in sonorant+/t/

Böhm, I. A. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

27 Aug 2022

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

An Iterated Learning Experiment of Morphonotactic Consonant Clusters

Böhm, I. A. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

5 Aug 2022

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Tracing the evolution of gender bias in large diachronic corpora

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

5 Aug 2022

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Phonotactically probable word shapes represent attractors in the evolution of sound patterns - An introduction to a database of Early Middle English sound patterns

Matzinger, T. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

28 Sept 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Phonotactically probable word shapes represent attractors in the evolution of sound patterns

Matzinger, T. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

19 Sept 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Subjectification may result from ‘mind-reading’

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Zöpfl, A. (Speaker)

18 Sept 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Aesthetic perception of prosodic patterns as a factor in speech segmentation

Matzinger, T. (Speaker), Specker, E. (Contributor), Ritt, N. (Contributor) & Fitch, W. T. S. (Contributor)

7 Sept 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Linguistic markers of group affiliation increase trust as much as other biological and cultural tags

Schwarz, M. (Speaker), Matzinger, T. (Contributor) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

7 Sept 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Phonotactically probable word shapes represent attractors in the evolution of sound patterns

Matzinger, T. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

3 Sept 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Quantifying changes in gender bias in the Google Books Corpus

Ritt, N. (Speaker), Schwarz, M. (Speaker), Matzinger, T. (Speaker), Baumann, A. (Speaker) & Vukovic, V. (Speaker)

1 Sept 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Assessing the effect of shared language and other social group markers on trust

Schwarz, M. (Speaker), Matzinger, T. (Contributor) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

30 Aug 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

If Languages Evolve, We Need to Know How

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

19 Jul 2021

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Abundance and other correlates of linguistic stability: formal predictions and evidence from sparse lexical items

Baumann, A. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

2020

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Testing shared language as a source of trust in an investment game

Schwarz, M. (Speaker), Matzinger, T. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

13 Sept 2019

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening produced canonical word form shapes

Matzinger, T. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Contributor)

2019

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

The effects of prosodic cues on word segmentation in an artificial language learning task

Matzinger, T. (Speaker), Schwarz, M. (Contributor), Ritt, N. (Contributor) & Fitch, W. T. S. (Contributor)

2019

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Language and evolution: Issues and perspectives

Fitch, W. T. S. (Speaker), Progovac, L. (Speaker), Schwartz, G. (Speaker), Żywiczyński , P. (Speaker), Gąsiorowski , P. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

15 Sept 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Thematic session "The cultural evolution of language: Models and methods"

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Gasiorowski, P. (Speaker)

15 Sept 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

What is a cultural replicator, and do we need to know?

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

15 Sept 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Characteristics of pauses in L2 speech in different speech tempi

Matzinger, T. (Speaker), Ritt, N. (Contributor) & Fitch, W. T. S. (Contributor)

13 Sept 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

The effects of final lengthening and pauses on word segmentation in artificial language learning

Matzinger, T. (Speaker), Ritt, N. (Contributor) & Fitch, W. T. S. (Contributor)

1 Sept 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Everything you always wanted to know about Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening but didn’t dare to ask

Ritt, N. (Keynote speaker)

29 Aug 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Linguistic and non-linguistic correlates in the evolution of phonotactic diversity

Baumann, A. (Speaker), Matzinger, T. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

18 Apr 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Word form shapes are culturally selected for indicating their morphological structure

Ritt, N. (Speaker), Baumann, A. (Speaker) & Prömer, C. (Contributor)

17 Apr 2018

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening and statistical (mor-)phonotactics

Ritt, N. (Speaker) & Matzinger, T. (Speaker)

1 Dec 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

'Subjectification' in semantic change, and what drives it

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

10 Oct 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

/l/- darkening in Austrian learner English

Matzinger, T. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

12 Sept 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Reconstructing the spread of Middle English schwa loss

Baumann, A. (Speaker), Prömer, C. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

12 Sept 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Phonotactic word form shapes are selected to be morphotactically indicative

Ritt, N. (Speaker), Prömer, C. (Speaker), Baumann, A. (Speaker) & Kazmierski, K. (Speaker)

8 Sept 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Presentation of the ECCE database

Baumann, A. (Speaker), Prömer, C. (Speaker), Ritt, N. (Speaker), Andorfer, P. (Speaker), Schopper, D. (Speaker) & Wissik, T. (Speaker)

7 Sept 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Interpolating Diachronic Phonotactic Data: On the Logistic Spread of Middle English Schwa Loss

Baumann, A. (Speaker), Prömer, C. (Speaker) & Ritt, N. (Speaker)

31 Jul 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

Diachronic (Mor-)phonotactics: Schwa loss & the evolution of final consonant clusters in Middle English

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

9 May 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Science

The Vienna Circle's influence on scientific methodology in linguistics

Ritt, N. (Speaker)

7 Apr 2017

Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Science to Public