Uli Sauerland
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Uli Sauerland is the vice-director and leads the semantics-pragmatics department at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin. The central question in Uli Sauerland's research program is: what can the study of language reveal about human thought? I addition to many influential contributions to semantics and pragmatics, Uli Sauerland has done primary fieldwork in the Lower Sunda islands and the Amazon.
Currently he is collecting child language data from across the world in an ERC funded research project. Sauerland teaches regularly at the University of Potsdam and tought as visiting professor at Rio de Janeiro, Stanford, Harvard, Vienna and others.
Among other honors, Uli Sauerland was selected as the fellow ambassadeure for the humanities and social sciences of the French CNRS from 2024 to 2027.
Uli Sauerland joins Paris IAS in November 2025 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Semantics ; pragmatics ; logic ; syntax ; child language ; language typology ; animal communication.
Rethinking Compositionality
A striking feature of human cognition is that elementary units can be combined into larger units in a non-trivial way, where trivial composition is generally understood as the logical conjunction of two units of meaning. Non-trivial composition is widely assumed to require function application (Frege, Montague, and others). But at least four consequences of the whole-sale adoption of function application have been argued to be possibly undesirable: formal power, optionality of some elements, status of thematic roles and unlimited arity.
A formal concept that can in many cases replace functions is minimization of events (Sauerland et al. 2023). In the nominal domain, minimization is attested as the singular, and in some languages (e.g. Rembarrnga, Ilocano) also as the minimal inclusive form (Conklin): the unit of me and you in such languages is marked as a singular since there no proper part of it contains both me and you. In the event domain, we can similar derive that the minimal event of falling that contains an apple is one where the apple rather than something else falls. This way of combining verbs and nouns is logically limited to one noun per verb, and therefore solves the problem of unlimited arity, but by disallowing relational concepts entirely. Similarly optionality of arguments is predicted freely, which again solves the problem of the function approach, but is too liberal in some cases. Concerning the status of thematic roles and the overall power, the predictions depend in part on the adjustments to be made to fully deliver on the arity and optionality problems.
Key publications
Sauerland, Uli et Alexiadou, Artemis. "Generative Grammar: A Meaning First Approach". Frontiers in Psychology 11. 571295,2020.
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.571295
Sauerland, Uli & Bassi, Itai & Bill, Cory & Bimpeh, Abigail & Hirsch, Aron & Jeretič, Paloma & Meyer, Marie-Christine & Nicolae, Andreea C. & Yatsushiro, Kazuko & Alexiadou, Artemis. "An Algebra of Thought that predicts key aspects of language structure". Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27. 589–608, 2023.
DOI: 10.18148/sub/2023.v27.1088
Sauerland, Uli & Meyer, Marie-Christine & Yatsushiro, Kazuko. "The cum-sine pattern in German child language: An argument for antonym decomposition". Language Acquisition. 1–13. 2024.
DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2024.2332452
 Online conference by Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin, Germany, Paris IAS) as part of the "Paris IAS Ideas" series. Open to the public, registration required. |
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