Evelien Keizer is professor of English Theoretical Linguistics (“Variation and Cognition”) at the University of Vienna. She obtained her PhD in English Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with a dissertation entitled Refe­rence, predication and (in)definiteness in Functional Grammar (1992), written within the framework of Simon Dik’s Functional Grammar (FG). Since then she has written extensively on the noun phrase (appositions, binominal constructions, pseudopartitives, sort/kind/type constructions, possessives, etc.), resulting in the publication of a monograph on the structural, cognitive and communicative aspects of the English noun phrase (The English noun phrase: the nature of linguistic categorization, 2007, Cambridge University Press). Other areas of interest include information structure, constituent order phenomena, prepositions and verb-preposition constructions, idiomatic expressions, the X is construction, and, more generally, linguistic categorization and the role of gradience in linguistic theory. Most of her research is carried out within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008), a model which, due to its top-down and comprehensive nature, is well-suited to studying the interaction between the different subcomponents of grammar – pragmatics, semantics, morphosyntax and phonology – as well as the role of cognition and context in the formulation of linguistic utterances. However, despite a career-long commitment to functionalism, she is also interested in other theoretical models and approaches (functional, cognitive and generative) and in particular in how insights from these various approaches may supplement each other. Her current research centres on partitive constructions, modification (adverbial and adjectival/participial), extra-clausal constituents (discourse-pragmatic function, placement, prosodic realization), and the nature of interfaces in Functional Discourse Grammar.

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Zlatan Kojadinović is a prae doc assistant at the English Department of the University of Vienna, where he also completed his MA degree in English linguistics in 2018. His MA research concerned the description of the English noun phrase and restrictive apposition, its discourse functions, definite and indefinite reference and specificity. His current research interest lies in the complex relations between the syntactic, prosodic and semantico-pragmatic properties of certain parenthetical constructions such as comment clauses, adverbials, nominal apposition, vocatives, etc. In his PhD project, he aims to explore to what extent prosodic phrasing can be accounted for in relation to semantic (truth-conditional) and syntactic features, and to what extent other discourse-pragmatic factors (systematically) influence prosodic realization. The theoretical framework of the study is Functional Discourse Grammar.

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Felix Berner is a pre-doc university assistant at the English Department of the University of Vienna, where he also obtained his MA degree in English Language and Linguistics in 2021. His MA research investigated the formal and functional behaviour of interpersonal adverbs such as honestly and sincerely, and their representation within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). His current research interest revolves around the topic of degree modification, the formal and functional behaviour of degree words, and the interaction between degree words, adjectives and nouns.  The topic of his PhD project is the classification and analysis of various degree words and degree constructions within the English Noun Phrase, and how to represent them within FDG.  Of particular interest is the question of whether the respective degree words are modifiers (lexically expressed information), operators (grammatically expressed information), or lexical operators (an in between category). Aim of his research is to establish an inventory of degree categories in FDG, as well as the testing and refining of previously proposed analyses.

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Matthias Mittendorfer is a pre-doc university assistant at the English Department of the University of Vienna, where he studied English and Russian (BA) and English Linguistics (MA). In his MA thesis on the topic of vowel reduction in Standard Southern British, he looked at possible ways of incorporating phonological research in the largely semantic framework of Cognitive Grammar. His current research interest revolves around intonational phonology and the way in which pragmatic and/or semantic distinctions are reflected in prosody. This interest is pursued within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). In his PhD project, he investigates the prosody of information packaging (particularly the way in which categories like Topic, Focus and Contrast are coded in the prosody of British English) and, in doing so, also aims to shed some light on the phonological level in FDG.

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