Dr Johannes Heim

Biography

I joined LLMVC in 2022 as a Lecturer in Language & Linguistics after two short stints in Greifswald, DE and Newcastle, UK. 

My research focuses on how adults and infants interact in conversation using discourse particles, prosody, and gestures. Much of this work revolves around non-assertive speech acts (aka 'non-canonical' questions).

If you are interested in PhD supervision on any of these topics, feel free to send me your proposal and CV. I am also open to mentoring Postdoctoral Fellowships (British Academy, Leverhulme, Horizon Europe's MSCA).

Internal Memberships

Director of PGR for the School of Language, Literature, Music & Visual Culture

REF Co-lead (Linguistics) for UoA27 (with Prof Andrew Gorden and Prof David Wheatley)

Co-director for the Centre of Training and Research in Linguistics (with Prof Robert McColl Millar)

Research Overview

My research explores the syntax, pragmatics, prosody and gestures of interactional language in adults and infants. At the prosody-pragmatics interface, my research looks at how intonation encodes speaker attitudes and expectations. A particular focus here has been to explore how intonation contributes to the mapping of clause types and speech acts. At the syntax-pragmatics interface, I have worked on the syntactic integration of discourse particles in a range of unrelated languages. This work shows that discourse particles are subject to similar syntactic mechanisms as constituents inside the clause. At the syntax-prosody interface, I show that a syntactic integration of prosody explains the distributional facts of various contours and particles. Lately, I have started investigating how co-speech gesture signals (non-)canonical meaning and how infants draw on multimodal cues to scaffold language acquisition.