UNIVERSITY OF AARHUS   FACULTY OF HUMANITIES   Institute of Language, Literature & Culture   Department of English

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	Sten Vikner Professor, dr. phil. habil. Department of English Institute of Language, Literature & Culture         University of Aarhus DK-8000 Århus C, Denmark		I have four home pages (sorry!):   ·   very brief   ·   detailed (this one)   ·   very brief   ·   detailed
			See also New neuroscience research cluster: MindLab Research Grant: DKK 120 Mill. • Lingustics events in Århus Dept. of English events at AU CCC research cluster events
Contact:	Tel. +45 8942 6522 (direct) Tel. +45 8942 6500 (department secretary) Tel. +45 8942 1111 (university switchboard)	Fax +45 8942 6540 E-mail: sten.vikner@hum.au.dk
Office:	Building 1463 (Jens Chr. Skous Vej 5), Room 421

This page:	Office hour	Classes	Present position	Research interests
	Past appointments	Degrees	Publications       (separate page)	Workshops       (separate page)
	Min danske hjemmeside       My Danish home page
My other web pages:	Project on clauses and nominals       (2008-2011)	DanDiaSyn project (Danish dialect syntax)       (2007-2008)	Project on Object Positions       (2005-2007)	Optimality Theory Syntax Project       (1999-2001)
	Transcription of English Vowels       (as ps or pdf)	Linguistics and the Theory of Science       (my own page)	Der yiddisher alef-beys (The Yiddish alphabet)       (in English)	Three Yiddish Phrases
	Sproget er et genetisk determineret organ       (in Danish)		English Dept. Relay Race Team       (20.8.2002)	Various WWW-links

Classes (Autumn 2009):

Syntax & Morphology (Lectures, 1st semester, only hovedfag)
       Monday 11:15-12:00, Lecture Hall A1, Building 1441
Videnskabsteori (Studium Generale) (Lectures, 3rd semester)
       Monday 12:15-14:00, Lecture Hall A1, Building 1441, Sept. 21 & Oct. 5 only.
The Syntactic Structure of Clauses and Nominals (M.A. level course)
       Monday 14:15-16:00, Room 416, Building 1463
Syntax & Morphology (1st semester, only sidefag)
       Tuesday 11:15-12:00, Room 416, Building 1463
Syntax & Morphology (Group A, 1st semester, hovedfag)
       Tuesday 14:15-15:00, Room 416, Building 1463
Videnskabsteori (Studium Generale) (Question sessions, 3rd semester)
       Tuesday 15:15-16:00, Lecture Hall A1, Building 1441, Sept. 22 & Oct. 6 only.
Comparative Syntax (Valgfag, 3rd semester)
       Wednesday 10:15-12:00, Room 223, Building 1453

Classes taught in previous semesters

Present position
I am a professor with special responsibilites in theoretical and comparative linguistics (see e.g. my inaugural lecture, the press release on the faculty web site (in Danish), or a cutting from the university newspaper Campus (also in Danish)). I am part of the English Department which is again part of the Institute of Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Aarhus. I am member of the research committee of Institute of Language, Literature and Culture, and Susana Fernàndez and I are the coordinators of the lingustics research team at the institute. Within the research cluster / research focus area CCC (Cognition, Communication and Culture), I am the coordinator of the topic "comparative linguistics". From 2009 to 2013, I am the leader of the section Cognition, Language and Music within the neuroscientific research cluster: MindLab. The entire cluster is headed by Leif Østergaard and Andreas Roepstorff, and the other sections are headed by Eva Vedel Jensen, Armin Geertz, Dorthe Berntsen, and Troels Staehelin-Jensen. The entire cluster is financed by the Ministry for Science, Techology and Innovation. From 2008 to 2011, I am the leader of a research project on clauses and nominals, which also includes Steffen Krogh, Henning Nølke and Johanna Wood, all from the Institute of Language, Literature and Culture. The project also includes post doc Eva Engels and Ph.D. student Katrine Planque Tafteberg, and it is financed by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation). From 2007 to 2008, I was part of the research project DanDiaSyn (on Danish dialect syntax), which was headed by Henrik Jørgensen from the Scandinavian Institute, and which also included Karen Margrethe Pedersen of the University of Copenhagen. The project was financed by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation). From 2005 to 2007, I was the leader of a research project on object positions, which also included Henrik Jørgensen from the Scandinavian Institute. The project was financed by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation). I am the supervisor of three ph.d. students, Johannes Kizach, Anne Kjeldahl and Anne Mette Nyvad. I am associated with Sprogvidenskabelig Forskerskole Nord, a linguistic Ph.D.-programme that is a cooperation between University of Aarhus, Aarhus School of Business, and University of Aalborg. I was also the supervisor of Tanja Schmid (defense on Oct. 5, 2002, Univ. of Stuttgart) and of Ken Ramshøj Christensen (defense on Sept. 22, 2005, Univ. of Aarhus), and I was co-supervisor of Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson (defense on June 10, 2004, Univ. of Aarhus) and Laura Winther Balling (defense on March 16, 2009, Univ. of Aarhus). I am one of two main editors of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics, together with Catherine Ringen of the University of Iowa. I am furthermore a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, of the journal Studia Linguistica, of the journal Tidsskrift for Sprogforskning (Journal of Language Research), and of the book series Linguistics Today. I am the head of the Århus groups under ScanDiaSyn (Scandinavian Dialect Syntax) and NORMS (Nordic Centre of Excellence in Microcomparative Syntax). Finally, I am a member of the board of the Center for Lingustics, University of Aalborg.

Research interests (See also the article "Method in the Madness" in the booklet University of Aarhus 2004.) My main research interest is the syntax of English, Danish, and the related Germanic languages (Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic, Yiddish, German, Swiss German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian) and also the syntax of French and Italian. The linguistic framework of most of my research is generative grammar, which I consider to be the most adequate and promising of the existing linguistic theories. This does not mean, however, that I think that one can ignore the work that has been done within other linguistic theories or frameworks. On generative grammar, see e.g. "Frequently asked questions about linguistics" and "Det særlige ved sproget " (in Danish); on the relation between generative grammar and the theory of science, see e.g. "Linguistics and the Theory of Science"; and on the relation between generative grammar and other linguistic frameworks, see e.g. my inaugural lecture "Theoretical and Comparative Linguistics" from 2006, or my article in Danish from 2004 "Nødvendigheden af en formel tilgang til sprogvidenskab" [The necessity of a formal approach to linguistics], or this quote from Newmeyer 1998. One of my research goals is to find out which syntactic properties of English, Danish, or any other of the above languages is found only in that particular language, and which ones are shared with other languages, where I try to account for as many empirical surface differences as possible by deriving them from as few theoretical underlying differences as possible. At the moment, I am working on the projects mentioned above on similarities and differences between clauses and nominals, on Danish dialect syntax and on object positions and their interpretation, and furthermore I am still working on verb movement within Optimality Theory syntax, and the link between the richness of verbal inflection and Vo-to-Io movement. List of research areas List of publications

From 1984 to 1990, I was assistant professor at the University of Geneva. From 1990 to 2001, I was assistant professor at the University of Stuttgart, where I was one of eight founding members of the Ph.D. programme in Linguistics, Linguistic Representations and their Interpretation. From 2001 to 2005, I was assistant professor at the University of Aarhus.

I have furthermore been a visiting scholar at M.I.T. (Sept.-Dec. 1987), at the University of Lund (Jan.-March 1988), and at the University of Tromsø (April-June 1988), visiting assistant professor at Rutgers University (Sept.-Dec. 1996), a fellow at N.I.A.S. (Feb.-June 1997), and visiting professor at the Dept. of Linguistics, University of Aarhus (Sept.-Oct. 1998).

In the autumn of 2008 and the spring of 2009, I was visting professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, where I was associated with the research projects Structure and Linearization in Disharmonic Word Orders and The Development of Negation in the Languages of Europe.

From January 1999 to December 2001, Gereon Müller and I were the principal investigators in a research project on optimality theory syntax financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).

From 1994 to 2002, I was the secretary of the board of GLOW ("Generative Linguists in the Old World").

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First posted: March 1997 (as http://pinguin.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de/ifl/Vikner.html) March 2001 (here, i.e. http://www.engelsk.au.dk/en/) Last modified:  August 30, 2009 Comments and suggestions to Sten Vikner