Dr Johannes Heim

Biography

I joined LLMVC in April 2022 as a Lecturer in Linguistics after two short stints in Greifswald and Newcastle. 

I’m mostly interested in researching how adults and infants use interactional units of language (particles, prosody, and gesture) in conversation. Much of this work is couched in a syntactocentric framework.

You will find more information on my research and teaching on my personal website.

Internal Memberships

Impact Lead for the School of Language, Literature, Music & Visual Culture (with Dr Fransiska Louwagie)

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 doctoral rearch showed that sentence-final intonation in English encodes the speaker’s commitment to an utterance and their expectation regarding the addressee’s engagement. This decomposition of intonational meaning reveals unknown similarities of several speech acts across different clause types. 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.