Cornelia Loos, PhD
ABOUT ME
I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Experimental Sign Lab at Göttingen University. My research focuses on the grammatical structure and semantic interpretation of signed languages, in particular German Sign Language (DGS) and American Sign Language (ASL). During my graduate career, I focused on issues at the interface of lexical semantics and syntax, including part-of-speech classification (Adjectives in ASL), syntactic diagnostics for sentence boundaries in signed languages, and resultative constructions (DGS and ASL). Since then my focus has shifted slightly towards formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics. At the moment, I’m working on the semantics of response particles in DGS and exploring the behavior of presupposition triggers in DGS.
EDUCATION & QUALIFICATIONS
| 2011 – 2017 | University of Texas at Austin PhD in Linguistics, 2017 Dissertation: “The Syntax and Semantics of Resultative Constructions in Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS) and American Sign Language (ASL)” |
| 2010 – 2011 | Universiteit van Amsterdam MA in General Linguistics, 2011 MA thesis: "Quite a mouthful: Comparing speech act verbs in Nederlandse Gebarentaal and American Sign Language" |
| 2006 – 2007 | McGill University (Canada) Visiting Student in the Department of Linguistics (DAAD scholar) (DAAD – German Academic Exchange Service) |
| 2003 – 2009 | Universität Leipzig M.A. (Magistra Artium) in British Studies (major), Hispanic Studies and Psychology (minors), 2009 Magister thesis: "Word Formation in American Sign Language: Investigating Headedness in ASL Compounds" |
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
| 2017 – jetzt | Postdoctoral researcher (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) Institute for German Philology, Göttingen University |
| 2011 – 2017 | Doctoral researcher Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin |
| 2009 – 2010 | DAAD Language assistant and representative CUCSH, Universidad de Guadalajara |
| 2006 – 2008 | Student Assistant English Department, Leipzig University |
| 2005 | Student Assistantt Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig |
PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
Loos, Cornelia. 2017. The Syntax and Semantics of Resultative Constructions in Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS) and American Sign Language (ASL). Austin, TX.: University of Texas at Austin Dissertation. [3 citations] [pdf]
Refereed journal articles
Loos, Cornelia. (accepted). Detecting clauses and their relationships in signed utterances: A syntactic-semantic approach. Glossa.
Loos, Cornelia. (accepted with revisions). Quite a mouthful: Comparing speech act verbs in
Nederlandse Gebarentaal and American Sign Language. Linguistische Berichte.
Loos, Cornelia, Jens-Michael Cramer, & Donna Jo Napoli. (submitted). Taboo terms in German
Sign Language: Exploiting phonology. Cognitive Linguistics.
Loos, Cornelia. 2014. “Überlegungen zum dequeísmo: Verbreitung, Entstehung und
Funktion”. Verbum et Lingua 4: 80-101. [pdf]
Articles in refereed conference proceedings
Loos, Cornelia. 2016. Give me a break: Determining clause boundaries in two sign languages. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society. [pdf]
Loos, Cornelia. 2015. Wenn man's bedenkt - Taking another look at applicative be-verbs in German. Proceedings of the 14th Meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society. [pdf]
Loos, Cornelia. 2013. What's Mine Is Yours: A typological view of possessive constructions in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Proceedings of the 13th Meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society. [pdf]
Edited volumes
Christopher Brown, Qianping Gu, Cornelia Loos, Jason Mielens & Grace Neveu. 2015. Proceedings of the 15th Meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society. Austin, TX 2014.
Other publications
Loos, Cornelia. 2017. The syntax and semantics of resultative constructions in Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS) and American Sign Language (ASL). Dissertation Abstract, Sign Language & Linguistics 20:2.
Loos, Cornelia. (in progress). The syntactic realization of argument structure. In Quer, J. et al. The SignHub Reference Grammars of Sign Languages. German Sign Language.
INVITED TALKS
Loos, Cornelia. 2018. Kausale Beziehungen in Resultativkonstruktionen: Ein Vergleich von ASL und Englisch. Invited talk at the Institute for German Sign Language (IDGS) Hamburg, 07/02/2018, Hamburg, Germany.
Loos, Cornelia. 2014. Adjectives in American Sign Language – A class of their own?. Invited talk at the Center for Language Studies at Radboud University, 06/24 2014, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Loos, Cornelia. 2014. Adjektive in ASL: Eine Klasse für sich?. Nachwuchsworkshop Sign Language in Göttingen, 07/07 2014 Göttingen, Germany.
REFEREED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
Loos, Cornelia. 2018. Approaching the semantics of concealed causatives: Evidence from resultative constructions in English and American Sign Language (ASL). Paper presented at the Form-Meaning Mismatches in Natural Language workshop, Göttingen 2018.
Loos, Cornelia. 2018. Directness of causation constraints on resultative constructions in ASL and English. Paper presented at FEAST 2018, Venice.
Loos, Cornelia. 2018. Argument realization in composed events: A closer look at resultatives in DGS. Paper presented at the Argument Structure Across Modalities Workshop, Amsterdam.
Loos, Cornelia. 2017. Exploring the syntax and semantics of resultative constructions in German Sign Language (DGS). Paper presented at the LSA 2017 Annual Meeting, Austin, TX.
Loos, Cornelia. 2016. How to lick a plate clean in DGS: Resultative constructions in German Sign Language. Paper presented at FEAST 2016, Venice.
Loos, Cornelia. 2016. How to talk about cause and effect in German Sign Language (DGS). Paper presented at the 16th Meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society, Austin, Texas.
Loos, Cornelia. 2016. Give me a break: Determining clause boundaries in two sign languages. Paper presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley.
Loos, Cornelia. 2016. The expression of cause-result events in ASL. Paper presented at the 12th Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, Melbourne, Australia.
Loos, Cornelia. 2014. Approaching ASL Adjectives: Word order & lexical semantics. Paper presented at the 11th High Desert Linguistics Society Meeting, Albuquerque.
Loos, Cornelia. 2013. Wenn man's bedenkt - Taking another look at applicative be-verbs in German. Paper presented at the 14th Meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society, Austin, Texas.
Loos, Cornelia. 2012. What's mine is yours: A typological view of possessive constructions in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Paper presented at the 13th Meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society, Austin, Texas.
Loos, Cornelia. 2011. Quite a mouthful: The influence of language contact on speech act verbs in Sign Language of the Netherlands and American Sign Language. Paper presented at the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Conference, Accra.
Loos, Cornelia. 2011. Quite a mouthful: Comparing speech act verbs in Nederlandse Gebarentaal and American Sign Language. Paper presented at the 2011 Thesis Festival of the Linguistics Department at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (winning paper).
Loos, Cornelia. 2008. Switching back and forth: Two theories of constraints on code switching revisited. Paper presented at the 30th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society DGfS, Bamberg, Germany.
Loos, Cornelia. 2005. Words to the wise: An examination of the suffix -wise in British English. Paper presented at the 39th Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft, Bern, Switzerland.