Roland Pfau

ABOUT ME

After having received my MA (1995) as well as my PhD degree (2001) from the University of Frankfurt, I joined the University of Amsterdam in May 2001 as assistant professor in General Linguistics. Whilst studying in Frankfurt, I was focusing on issues in psycholinguistics and formal grammar theory. Both these aspects play an important role in my PhD thesis in which I investigate the processing of grammatical category labels and morphosyntactic features in language production, i.e. their role in spontaneous slips of the tongue.
As member of a research group in Frankfurt, I became involved in sign language research around 1995. It started as a hobby, but soon I devoted most of my time to sign language issues. Ever since, I have been doing research on aspects of sign language morphophonology (e.g. pluralization), morphosyntax (e.g. agreement, classifiers, negation, and reciprocals), syntax (e.g. relative clauses,questions), and grammaticalization - much of this in collaboration with Markus Steinbach from the University of Göttingen. Much of this work focuses on German Sign Language, but I am also interested in taking a typological and cross-linguistic perspective on these issues and I enjoy collaborating with colleagues who work on other sign languages (e.g. Catalan Sign Language, Indian Sign Language, Italian Sign Language).
[see below for my CV]

Together with Josep Quer (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), I am editor of the journal Sign Language & Linguistics;
together with my UvA colleague Judith Rispens, I am editing Linguistics in Amsterdam. [see below for links]
I am also editorial board member of the Mouton de Gruyter Sign Language Typology (SLT) series 
 

Amsterdam Center for Language&Communication (ACLC)

My Curriculum Vitae

Linguistics in Amsterdam

Sign Language&Linguistics

NEWS

Upcoming conferences/talks/courses:

-- Workshop "Experimental studies in sign language research" at the 34th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS), Frankfurt (Main), March 7-9, 2012 [see below link to conference website]

-- Conference "Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory" (FEAST 2012), Warsaw, June 1-2, 2012 [see below link to conference website]

-- 2nd Sign Language Workshop, associated with World Congress of African Linguistics-7 (WOCAL-7), University of Buea (Cameroon), August 20-24, 2012 [see below link to conference website]

Also see: "Upcoming presentations" in the "Presentations" section.

DGfS 2012

WOCAL-7

FEAST 2012

TEACHING 1st semester 2011/2012

Morfologie van Gebarentalen                       (tue 11-13, BH 302)
Advanced Sign Linguistics (MA)                   (tue 13-18, PCH K09)
BA thesis                                                          (on appointment)
MA thesis                                                         (on appointment)

Advanced Sign Linguistics

Morfologie van Gebarentalen