Daniel Büring

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is about the knowledge of language that we all have in our heads. Linguists like me don't make up rules on how to `speak right'. We observe how people actually speak, and try to figure out what rules they - unconsciously - follow.

My own teaching and research focusses on natural language semantics and pragmatics, in other words, meaning and use of language. A particular interest of mine is intonational meaning, that is, how tone of voice, melody or inflection influence the meaning of what we say. I try to develop formal tools capable of modeling this kind of interaction between meaning, prosody, and syntax.

My most recent book, Intonation and Meaning, a survey/state-of-the-art book, appeared in 2016 with Oxford University Press. A while back, I wrote another book, a textbook on the syntax and semantics of Binding Theory.

I work in the general paradigm of generative (not necessarily transformational) grammar, and logical semantics.

For the last few years, I have worked on and with a new formalism for calculating and interpreting focus alternatives, called Unalternative Semantics.

Other topics of interest to me are German syntax, binding theory, and generally all aspects of the syntax-semantics interface. All of these I also teach on.

I like to sail, and to play and sing with bands, and am always open to invitations for either one...