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Professor of Theoretical and
Experimental Linguistics
Institute of Linguistics, University of Vienna
Together with Lily Kahn, we held an AHRC-funded research project to study Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. We carried out field work, resulting in over 100 hours of recordings with speakers of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish from all over the world, including Israel (Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Tel Aviv), the New York area (Williamsburg, Monsey, Borough Park), Montreal and London’s Stamford Hill. We have recordings from male and female speakers, between the ages 16-80+, coming from a variety of Hasidic background and family origin. Our research targeted theoretical linguistic analysis of CHY as well as its sociolinguistic context. You can find more information about the project on our website.
My own work focuses on the analysis of various areas of Yiddish syntax, including basic word order, determiner doubling, the syntax and prosody of focus, deaccenting and the acquisition of Yiddish by children in the community. Our first results established that a major grammatical change took place in the Yiddish of the Stamford Hill community: it lost morphological gender and case marking [Belk, Kahn & Szendrői, 2020a]. We extended this finding to all the Hasidic communities worldwide, establishing Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish as a new variety of the language [Belk, Kahn & Szendrői, to appear 2022]. One strand of our work focused on the innovations in the pronominal system of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish [Belk, Kahn, Szendrői & Yampolskaya, under review a] another looked at the Hebrew/Aramaic component of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish [Belk, Kahn & Szendrői, 2020b].
We made longitudinal elicited production recordings with four children aged 2-7 in the Stamford Hill community. Together with Noah Ley (University of Edinburgh) and Athina Vasileaidou (University of Potsdam) we have transcribed part of the data and are in the course analysing the findings.
Our research project on Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and our research team undertook translation into Hasidic Yiddish and dissemination of government and health authority advice as well as police notices [Belk, Kahn, Szendrői & Yampolskaya, ]. Unfortunately, the Hasidic communities everywhere in the world have been hit by the first wave of the pandemic early on. We continued to support the Hasidic communities with translating and disseminating information about the COVID-19 vaccines and with expert advice [Szendrői 2020].
I have worked on the syntax of focus movement since my doctoral thesis [Szendrői 2001]. I have developed the idea that syntactic movement can be motivated by prosodic well-formedness requirements, so-called stress-driven movement. I worked mostly on Hungarian [Szendrői 2003, 2004b], Italian [Szendrői 2002], and English [Neeleman & Szendrői 2004]. I also conducted adult language processing experiments on this topic [Mulders & Szendrői 2016]. I explored the theoretical implications of this idea in several papers [Szendrői 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2017a].
With Fatima Hamlaoui we study the syntax-prosody interface. Our proposal is that the overt position of the finite verb determines what counts as a syntactic ‘clause’ for the purposes of the syntax-prosody mapping in ‘clauses’ and Intonational Phrases. In [Hamlaoui & Szendrői 2015] our account was based on data from the Finno-Ugric language, Hungarian and the Bantu language, Basáa. We later extended our account to complex sentences involving complement and adjunct clauses and clausal extraposition, [Hamlaoui & Szendrői 2017]. Our collaboration has also resulted in two review articles: one on topic/focus marking on determiners [Hamlaoui & Szendrői in press a] and one on the prosody and syntax of complement and adjunct clauses [Hamlaoui & Szendrői in press b]. Recently, we have also worked on focus marking in Kinyarwanda and Rwandan English based on field work conducted together [Hamlaoui & Szendrői 2021].
I have a long-standing interest in the acquisition of prosodic focus. During my postdoctoral work I worked with the late Tanya Reinhart on the relationship between children’s comprehension issues with only-sentences and processing issues resulting from global grammatical computations. Experimental work with Dutch 4-6-year olds [Szendrői 2004a] and with European Portuguese 4-6-year-olds [Costa & Szendrői 2006] showed that it is not the prosodic marking per se that seems problematic for children, rather their comprehension problems reflect the presence of an interpretative ambiguity. More recently, with Barbara Höhle, Frauke Berger, Judit Gervain and Carline Bernard [Szendrői et al. 2018] we studied the acquisition of prosodic focus by 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old English, French and German children. We designed a novel comprehension task and found that children are adultlike in their comprehension of prosodic focus in all three languages from Age 3. In a study with Mandarin Chinese children, we found that the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking is more problematic for children in this tone language [Chen et al. 2019].
I also worked on how sentences with alleen 'only' are parsed when associated with different prosodically marked foci. We showed that parsing is incremental in the sense that not only contrast but integration of the information for computing focal meaning is incremental [Mulders & Szendrői 2016].
An area that is of special interest to me is the intersection of scope ambiguity and information structure. It is well-known that certain scopal readings are blocked under certain information-structural configurations (e.g. Saebo 2008). I recently co-supervised a doctoral thesis by Riccardo Pulicani that presented experimental data on this issue in Italian. Another former student, Cecile Larralde, studied the effect of focus on negation-disjunction scopal interactions in French with children and adults [Larralde et al. 2021].
I am also interested in scopal ambiguities and its acquisition. With Barbara Höhle, Rebecca Schumacher and Tom Fritzsche, we studied the acquisition of quantifier raising by 5- and 6-year-old English and German children [Szendrői et al. 2017]. We carried out an act-out task whose results showed that children in both languages have access to both surface and inverse scope readings. This goes against the Isomorphism Observation (Musolino 1998) and supports Reinhart’s (2006) proposal on quantifier raising. I summarise current issues regarding this area in a review article [Szendrői 2003].
With Ad Neeleman we argued that radical pro drop, i.e. the possibility to omit pronouns in subject, object or possessor position in a language is dependent on the morphological make-up of the personal pronominal paradigm of the language. We tested our hypothesis on a typologically valid set of 35 languages [Neeleman & Szendrői 2007]. Sato (2010) argued that Colloquial Singapore English is a counterexample to our proposal, as its pronominal paradigm does not have the necessary morphological properties, and yet pronouns are omissible in the language. Our ongoing work suggests that this conclusion is premature. A paper on this issue is in preparation, as is a review article on the morphological properties of pro drop.
With Alina Konradt, I have been working on syntactic priming in English and Russian adults and children [Konradt & Szendrői in preparation].
With Marika Lekakou, I worked on determiner doubling in Greek [Lekakou & Szendrői 2012, 2014]
With Marta Abrusan, I worked on King of France sentences in English [Abrusán & Szendrői 2013]
With Peter Ackema, I worked on determiner sharing in English [Ackema & Szendrői 2002]
Szendrői, K.E. 2023. (Quantifier) Scope Judgments. In Oxford Handbook on Experimental Syntax, Jon Sprouse ed., Oxford: OUP, 53-96. DOI
Arunachalam, S., Deen, K.U., Huang, Y.T., Lidz, J., Miller, K., Ota, M., & Szendrői, K.E. 2022. Some concrete steps for journal editorial boards: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022). First Language, 42(6), 736-739. DOI
Belk, Zoë, Lily Kahn & K.E. Szendrői 2022a. Absence of morphological case and gender marking in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish worldwide. Special Issue of Journal of Germanic Linguistics, Lea Schafer & Marion Aptroot eds., 34(2), 139-185. DOI
Belk, Zoë, L. Kahn & Szendrői, K.E. & Sonya Yampolskaya. 2022a. Innovations in the Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish pronominal system. In Matt Coler & Andrew Nevins (eds.), Contemporary research in minoritized and diaspora languages of Europe, 143–187. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI
Belk, Z., Kahn, L., Szendrői, K.E., & Yampolskaya, S. 2022b. Introduction: Thematic Issue on Contemporary Haredi Yiddish Worldwide. Special Issue of Journal of Jewish Languages, Belk, Zoë, L. Kahn & Szendrői, K.E. & Sonya Yampolskaya eds., 10(2): 156-168. DOI
Belk, Z., Kahn, L.O., Szendrői, K.E., & Yampolskaya, S. 2022c. Translating COVID-19 information into Yiddish for the UK Hasidic community. Linguistics Vanguard. DOI
Belk, Zoë, Kahn, L., Szendrői, K.E. & Sonya Yampolskaya 2022d. Translating Covid-19 information into Yiddish for the Montreal-area Hasidic community. In Lockdown Cultures: The arts and humanities in the year of the pandemic, 2020-21, Stella Bruzzi, Maurice Biriotti eds. DOI
eds. Belk, Z., Kahn, L., Szendrői, K.E., & Yampolskaya, S. 2022e. Special Issue: Contemporary Haredi Yiddish Worldwide, Journal of Jewish Languages 10 (2). DOI
Hamlaoui, F., Engelmann, J., & Szendrői, K.E. 2021. Prosodic marking of focus and givenness in Kinyarwanda and Rwandan English. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 62, 135-160. DOI
Larralde Cecile, Konradt Alina & Szendrői, K.E. 2021. Information structure and scope interactions: disjunction wide scope induced by focus Frontiers in Communication 5: 131. DOI
Belk, Zoë, Lily Kahn & Szendrői, K.E. 2020c. On morphological gender and case-marking in Hasidic Yiddish: Initial evidence from the Stamford Hill Hasidim. In Jews and Slavs: 110 Years of a Jewish National Language, Proceedings of the Czernowitz International Yiddish Language Conference 2018. vol. 26, Wolf Moskovich ed., Dukh I Litera: Kyiv, 125-134. PDF
Belk, Zoë, Lily Kahn & Szendrői, K.E.. 2020b. The Loshn Koydesh Component in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. Special Issue of Journal of Jewish Languages entitled “Contact between Textual Hebrew/Aramaic and Diaspora Jewish Languages.", Sarah Bunin Benor & Ofra Tirosh-Becker eds., 8(1): 39–89. DOI
Belk, Zoë, Lily Kahn & Szendrői, K.E. 2020a. Complete loss of case and gender within two generations: evidence from Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 23: 271–326. DOI
Szendrői, K.E., Carline Bernard, Frauke Berger, Judit Gervain & Barbara Höhle 2018. Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds. Journal of Child Language, 45(1), 219-241. DOI PDF
Chen, Hui-Ching, K.E. Szendrői, Stephen Crain, Barbara Höhle 2019. Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese: Data from Children and Adults. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research: 48(1): 19–32. DOI
Szendrői, K.E., Rebecca Schumacher, Tom Fritzsche & Barbara Höhle 2017. Acquisition of quantifier raising of a universal across an existential: Evidence from German. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2(1), 46. DOI
Szendrői, K.E. 2017b. Focus movement (Hungarian). In The Companion to Syntax, 2nd edition, Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk eds., Wiley-Blackwell. PDF
Szendrői, K.E. 2017a. The syntax of information structure and the PF interface. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2(1), 32. DOI
Hamlaoui, Fatima, & Szendrői, K.E. 2017. The syntax-phonology mapping of intonational phrases in complex sentences: A flexible approach. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2(1), 55. DOI
Mulders, Iris & Szendrői, K.E. 2016. Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen ‘only’: Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm. Frontiers Psychology DOI
Hamlaoui, Fatima & Szendrői, K.E. 2015. A flexible approach to the syntax-phonology mapping of intonational phrases. Special Issue of Phonology Lisa Selkirk & Seunghun J. Lee eds., 35 (1): 79-110. DOI PDF
Lekakou, Marika & Szendrői, K.E. 2014. When determiners abound: Implications for the Encoding of Definitness. In Cross-linguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference (Syntax and Semantics 39), Patricia Cabredo-Hofherr & Anne Zribi-Hertz eds., Leiden: Brill, 212-238. PDF
Abrusán, Márta & Szendrői, K.E. 2013. Experimenting with the King of France – Topics, verifiability and definite descriptions. Semantics and Pragmatics 6: 10, 1-43. DOI
Szendrői, K.E. 2012. Focus movement can be destressing, but it need not be. In A flexible theory of topic and focus, Ad Neeleman & Reiko Vermeulen eds., Mouton de Gruyter. 189-226. PDF
Lekakou, Marika & Szendrői, K.E. 2012. Polydefinites in Greek: Ellipsis, Close Apposition, and Expletive Determiners. Journal of Linguistics 48(1), 107-149. DOI PDF
Abrusan, Márta & Szendrői, K.E. 2012. Experimenting with the King of France. In Logic, Language and Meaning. 18th Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Dec 2011, Revised Selected Papers, Maria Aloni, V. Kimmelmann, F. Roelofsen, G.W. Sassoon, K. Schultz & M. Westera eds., Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 102-111.
Brody, Michael & Szendrői, K.E. 2011. A kimerítő felsorolás értemezésű fókusz válasz. [Exhaustive focus is an answer]. In Új irányok és eredmények a mondattani kutatásban - Kiefer Ferenc 80. szuletesnapja alkalmabol [New directions and results in syntactic research - In honour of Ferenc Kiefer's 80th birthday] (Vol. 23)., Huba Bartos ed., Budapest: Akademiai Kiadó/ Academic Press. PDF PDF_ENG
Szendrői, K.E. 2010b. Focus as a grammatical notion: A case study on focus and autism. In The sound patterns of syntax, Nomi Erteschik-Shir & Lisa Rochman eds., Oxford: OUP, 317-332. PDF
Szendrői, K.E. 2010a. A flexible approach to discourse-related word order variations in the DP. Lingua 120 (4), 864-878. DOI
Lekakou, Marika & Szendrői, K.E. 2009. Interpretative effects of multiple determiners in Greek. Proceedings of BLS 35. 235-246.
Lekakou, Marika & Szendrői, K.E. 2009. Close apposition with and without noun ellipsis: an analysis of Greek polydefinites. Proceedings of the 29th Meeting of the Linguistics Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 151-166.
Neeleman, Ad & Szendrői, K.E. 2008. Case morphology and radical pro-drop. In Teresa Biberauer ed., The limits of syntactic variation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 331-348. PDF
Neeleman, Ad & Szendrői, K.E. 2007. A Radical pro drop and the morphology of pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 38(4), 671-714. DOI
Costa, João & Szendrői, K.E. 2006. Acquisition of focus marking in European Portuguese – Evidence for a unified approach to focus. In The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages. Vicenç Torrens & Linda Escobar eds., Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 319-329. PDF
Szendrői, K.E. 2005. Case 26: Focus movement (with special reference to Hungarian). The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk eds., Vol 2, 270-335.
Neeleman, Ad & Szendrői, K.E. 2005. Pro drop and pronouns. Proceedings of WCCFL 24., Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 299-307.
Szendrői, K.E., Tóth, I. 2004. Hungarian verbal clusters – results of a questionnaire survey. In Verb clusters. A study of Hungarian, German and Dutch, Katalin É.Kiss & Henk van Riemsdijk eds., Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 87-119. PDF
Szendrői, K.E. 2004c. Focus and the interaction between syntax and pragmatics - Introduction. Lingua 114:3, 229-254. DOI
Szendrői, K.E. 2004b. A stress-driven approach to climbing. In Verb clusters. A study of Hungarian, German and Dutch, Katalin É. Kiss & Henk van Riemsdijk eds., Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 205-223. PDF
Szendrői, K.E. 2004a. Acquisition evidence for an interface theory of focus. Proceedings of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2003 Volumes 1-2, Jacqueline van Kampen & Sergio Baauw eds., LOT Publications. Vol 2, 457-468. PDF
Neeleman, Ad & Szendrői, K.E. 2004. Superman sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 35(1), 149-159. PDF
Bury, Dirk, Karen Froud, Richard Horsey & Szendrői, K.E. 2004. Focus and the interaction between syntax and pragmatics - Preface. Lingua 114:3, 227-227.
Szendrői, K.E. 2003. A stress-based approach to the syntax of Hungarian focus. The Linguistic Review, 20(1): 37-78. DOI PDF
Szendrői, K.E. 2002. Stress-focus correspondence in Italian. In Romance languages and linguistic theory 2000. Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 2000, Utrecht, 30 November- 2 December, Claire Beyssade, Reineke Bok-Bennema, Frank Drijkoningen & Paola Monachesi eds., Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 287-303. PDF
Ackema, Peter & Szendrői, K.E. 2002. Determiner sharing as coordinate ellipsis. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 5 (1-3): 3-34. DOI
Hamlaoui, Fatima & K.E. Szendrői (in press, since October 2018) Topic/Focus marking on Determiners. In Handbook on Determiners, OUP, Solveiga Armoskaite & Martina Wiltschko eds. 25pp. PDF
Hamlaoui, Fatima & K.E. Szendrői (in press). Prosody and Syntax of Complement and Adverbial Clauses. In Handbook Clausal Embedding, Anton Benz, Werner Frey, Manfred Krifka, Marzena Zygis eds., Oxford: OUP, 56pp. PDF
Kahn, Lily, K.E. Szendrői & S. Yampolskaya (in press). Yiddish writing system. In Handbook of Germanic Writing Systems and Literacies, Stefan Hartmann, Dimitrios Meletis & Rebecca Treiman eds., De Gruyter. 45pp. PDF
K.E. Szendrői (in press). Yiddish Peripheries In Handbook of the Syntax of Germanic Languages: A Comparative Approach to Selected Topics, Wurmbrand, Susanne, Mursell, Johannes and Hartmann, Katharina, eds. De Gruyter, 2026. PDF
Konradt, Alina & K.E. Szendrői. Syntactic priming in English and Russian children and adults.
Neeleman, Ad & K.E. Szendrői. Radical pro drop in Singapore Colloquial English: a response to Sato (2010). Linguistic Inquiry, Squib.
Szendrői, K.E. 2001. Focus and the syntax-phonology interface. Doctoral Thesis, UCL, 273pp. PDF
Reinhart, T., Szendrői, K.E. 2003. Optimal design in language – Research proposal. 14pp. PDF
Bury, Dirk, Karen Froud, Richard Horsey & Szendrői, K.E. 2004. Eds., Special Issue on Focus and the interaction between syntax and pragmatics. Lingua 114:3, 227-388.
Szendrői, K.E. 2020. Evidence on the Hasidic (Ultra-Orthodox) Jewish community in the UK, submitted to the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on ‘Coronavirus and the impact on people with protected characteristics’ pp.5, 4 May 2020. PDF
a space for Yiddish language and culture in the heart of Leopoldstadt
It caters for the needs of the Viennese cultural public interested in Yiddish language and culture, throws a special spotlight on women’s contribution to Yiddish culture, and also reaches out to the Yiddish-speaking Orthodox community living in the vicinity of our location.
please don't use my office phone
kriszta.szendroi@univie.ac.at
Institute of Linguistics, University of Vienna
Sensengasse 3a, 1090, Vienna
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