Thomas Strobel

Thomas Strobel, research fellow at the DFG-funded project “Syntax of Hessian Dialects” (SyHD, 2010-2016) and at the Chair of Historical Linguistics at Goethe University Frankfurt (since 2012), has given many talks and published several papers on pronominal partitivity. Furthermore, he has written his PhD thesis on indefinite-partitive pronouns in varieties of German. For this purpose, he developed questionnaires and language production experiments with more than 25 final tasks on pronominal partitivity, elicited comprehensively with the help of about 1.000 SyHD informants. His work combines areal, microvariational, typological and diachronic aspects of partitive/quantitative pronouns, often making use of a contrastive approach, comparing the different systems in German dialects (e.g. Central German ere and sen) with Dutch (Du. er) as well as the Romance languages French (Fr. en) and Italian (It. ne). There has been a continuous cooperation with other PARTE network members for many years, especially with Elvira Glaser and Elisabeth Stark from the University of Zurich. His collaboration with Elvira Glaser is currently extended from the pronominal to the nominal domain, i.e. partitive determiners, exploring both Swiss German dialects (Valais German) and Luxembourgish.