Prof. Dr. Augustin Speyer

Augustin Speyer studied German Language and Literature, Classics, and Linguistics at the universities of Tuebingen, Oxford (University College), and Philadelphia (UPenn). He is Full Prrofessor for Historical German Grammar at Goettingen university. His research is focused on diachronic and synchronic syntax, information structure research, and textual linguistics.
Main subjects of his research have been coherence in literary texts (the tragedies of L. Annaeus Seneca) and argumentative newspaper texts in a comparative (German-English) perspective, information structural conditions for filling the left periphery of German declarative clauses and their ranking, the role of information structure for word order in historical stages of German, the interaction of syntax, prosody, and information structure in the history of English, and anaphora resolution in Old High German. He works mostly in the frameworks of SDRT and Centering Theory.