Lea Fricke

I am a linguist at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Kassel in the research group of Holden Härtl. My research interests lie in the area of semantics, pragmatics and empirical linguistics.

Before my current position, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Tatjana Scheffler’s lab for Digitale Forensische Linguistik at the German department of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. I worked in the project Semantics and Pragmatics of Emojis in Digital Communication, which is part of the priority program ViCom. In this project, we experimentally investigated the explanatory power of iconic and symbolic approaches to emoji semantics.

I completed my PhD at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz as part of the XPrag.de project Exhaustiveness in embedded questions across languages under supervison of Edgar Onea. In my dissertation, I studied on the one hand, the exhaustivity of embedded questions. On the other hand, I investigated the distribution of German wh-words in embedded questions under different embedding verbs and compared who- and which-questions with respect to their D-linking properties.

Further topics I have conducted research on include the German prefield-es, scalar implicatures and experimental methodology.