Dr. Lotte Sommerer

Dr. Lotte Sommerer

Assistant Professor
English Linguistics | Chair of Prof. Kortmann

lotte.sommerer@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
☎ +49 761 203-3321

R 4222 | KG IV

CV

Lotte Sommerer is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of English linguistics. After studying English and German at the University of Vienna and Toronto, she defended her PhD thesis on nominal determination and article emergence in Old English in 2011 at the University of Vienna. After holding a ph2 Professorship at the Kirchlich-Pädagogische Hochschule Wien/Krems from 2013 to 2016, she returned to the University of Vienna and was a member of the English Department from 2016 to 2021. Since March 2021 she has been working at the English Department of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität of Freiburg.

Lotte Sommerer is a historical, functional-cognitive linguist who works on morphosyntactic variation and change in contemporary English, Middle English and Old English. She subscribes to a usage-based, constructional theory of morphosyntax that does full justice to functional and cognitive constraints, takes account of variation and gives equal weight to form and function in order to explain the shape of and changes in a linguistic system.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Usage-based, Cognitive Construction Grammar (UCCxG)
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Grammaticalization, Constructionalization & Subjectification
• Lexicon-Grammar Interface
• Linguistic Gradience & Categorization
• Noun Phrase Structure
• Old English, Early Modern English

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMENT

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Sommerer, Lotte & Zehentner, Eva. (in prep). 'go to church or die in prison: tracing V-PP combinations with bare institutional nouns in the history of English'

• Bohmann, Axel & Sommerer, Lotte. (accepted). 'Quantitative methods and the history of English' In Hickey, R. (ed.). New Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol II. Kytö, M. & Smitterberg, E (eds.). Documentation, sources of data and modelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Van de Velde, Freek & Sommerer, Lotte. (accepted). 'Constructional networks', In Fried, M. Nikiforidou, K. (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Sommerer, Lotte. (in print, 2022). 'So great a desire’: investigating the BIG MESS construction in Early Modern English'. Journal of Historical Syntax.

• Sommerer, Lotte & Keizer, Evelien. (2022). 'Introduction – Trends in NP Research'. In Sommerer, L. & Keizer, E. (eds.). English Noun Phrases from a Functional-Cognitive Perspective: Current Issues. [Studies in Language Companion Series]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-23.

• Sommerer, Lotte. (2022). 'Day to day and night after night: temporal NPN constructions in English'. In Sommerer, L. & Keizer, E. (eds.). English Noun Phrases from a Functional-Cognitive Perspective: Current Issues. [Studies in Language Companion Series]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Sommerer, Lotte & Baumann, Andreas. (2021). 'Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters: the constructional network of English NPN constructions'. Cognitive Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2020-0013
• Sommerer, Lotte & Hofmann, Klaus. (2021). 'Constructional competition and network reconfiguration: investigating sum(e) in Old, Middle and Early Modern English'. English Language and Linguistics, 25(1), 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1017/S136067431900039X
• Smirnova, Elena & Sommerer, Lotte. (2020). 'The nature of the node and the network: open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar'. In Sommerer, L. & Smirnova, E. (eds.). Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar. [CAL, Vol. 27]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-42. https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.27.int
• Sommerer, Lotte. (2020). 'Constructionalization, constructional competition and constructional death: investigating the demise of Old English POSS DEM constructions'. In Sommerer, L. & Smirnova, E. (eds.). Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar. [CAL, Vol. 27]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 69-103. https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.27.02som
• Sommerer, Lotte. (2018). Article Emergence in Old English. A Constructionalist Perspective. [TIEL series, Vol. 99]. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110541052
• Sommerer, Lotte. (2015). 'The influence of constructions in grammaticalization: revisiting category emergence and the development of the definite article in English'. In Barðdal, J.; Smirnova, E.; Sommerer, L. & Gildea, S. (eds.). Diachronic Construction Grammar. [CAL, Vol. 18]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 107-138. https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.18.04som

TEACHING

• Code, Communication and Culture – Western Linguistics during the Last 100 years (Lecture)
• 'I am loving it!' Investigating Mechanisms of Language Change in Present Day English (Undergraduate seminar)
• Usage-Based Cognitive Construction Grammar (Advanced/Master seminar)