Main research areas
Latest publications
- Fliessbach, J. & Rosemeyer, M. (accepted). Euphemism, discourse function, and language change. French ‘diable’ and ‘diantre’ ‘the hell’ interrogatives in a corpus of historical plays. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics.
- Fliessbach, J. (accepted). Relating wh-placement in French to situational deixis, expressivity, and non-canonical questions. In P.-Y. Modicom (ed.), Deixis and indexicality (beyond) here and now (Studies in Pragmatics). Berlin , Leiden: Brill.
- Lewandowski, W. & Fliessbach, J. (2026). In search of the hidden path: The zero-encoding construction in satellite-framed English and verb-framed French. Journal of Pragmatics, 259, 57–71.
- Fliessbach, J., Tovena, L. M., & Fleury, D. (2025). Grammatical person as a clue to interpreting French ‘how’ questions. In Proceedings of the 29th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue – Full Papers. 6–16 . Bielefeld, Germany. http://semdial.org/anthology/Z25-Fliessbach_semdial_3304.pdf
- Fliessbach, J., & Rockstroh, J. (2025). Verb influence on French wh-placement: a parallel corpus study. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (CLLT), 21(2), 361–399. doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0001 .
Dr. Jan Fliessbach
Senior lecturer (LfbA)
- E-mail address: jan.fliessbach(at)ur.de (opens your email program)
- Location: PT, 3.3.41
- Important information: Office hours: During term time: Fridays 12 noon–1 pm (by appointment via email); During the summer break: via email with suggested dates
CV
Employment
| since 10/2026 | Senior Lecturer (LfbA) at the University of Regensburg, Institute for Romance Studies |
| since 10/2021 | Lecturer and research associate (post-doctorate) at the University of Potsdam, Institute for Romance Studies, Chair of Prof. Dr. Melanie Uth (external link, opens in a new window) |
03/2024–04/2024 09&11/2025 | Visiting scholar at Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (U. Paris Cité, CNRS) as Co-PI of the joint project PaCoCo (external link, opens in a new window) (DAAD/Campus France) with Lucia Tovena (external link, opens in a new window), Damien Fleury (external link, opens in a new window) and Johanna Rockstroh (external link, opens in a new window) |
| 03/2023–04/2023 | Visiting scholar of Labex EFL (external link, opens in a new window)at Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (U. Paris Cité, CNRS) with Lisa Brunetti (external link, opens in a new window) and Gabriel Thiberge (external link, opens in a new window) |
| 04/2016 – 09/2021 | Lecturer and PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin; Institute for Romance Philology; Chair of Prof. Dr. Uli Reich (external link, opens in a new window) |
| 02/2019 – 03/2019 | Visiting scholar at the Laboratori de Fonètica, Universitat de Barcelona (with Paolo Roseano (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| 03/2017 & 09/2018 | Guest researcher at the Universidad de Alcalá (with María Sancho Pascual (external link, opens in a new window), Ana María Cestero Mancera (external link, opens in a new window), Isabel Molina Martos (external link, opens in a new window), Florentino Paredes García (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| 03/2012 – 03/2016 | Student assistant (Linguistics, Free University of Berlin) |
| 08/2010 – 07/2012 | Assistant to the editorial office (Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, rbb) |
| 07/2008 – 07/2009 | Voluntary year of social work (Movimiento Ecuménico por los Derechos Humanos), Buenos Aires, Argentina (with Arturo Blatezky) |
Education
| 11/2017 – 06/2021 | PhD (Free University of Berlin) Title: Intonational meaning in Spanish: A dynamic semantics perspective on prosodically marked declaratives, exclamatives, and discourse particles (Grade: summa cum laude) |
| 10/2013 – 03/2016 | Master of Arts (Free University of Berlin) Languages of Europe. Structures and use |
| 10/2014 – 07/2015 | Exchange programme (Université de Montréal) Maîtrise en linguistique, funded with a scholarship from DAAD |
| 10/2009 – 07/2013 | Bachelor of Arts (Free University of Berlin) Political Science, Social Studies and Spanish Philology with Latin American Studies |
Publications and talks
Publications
15. Fliessbach, J. & Rosemeyer, M. (accepted). Euphemism, discourse function, and language change. French diable and diantre ‘the hell’ interrogatives in a corpus of historical theater plays. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics.
14. Fliessbach, J. (accepted). Relating wh-placement in French to situational deixis, expressivity, and non-canonical questions. In P.-Y. Modicom (Hrsg.), Deixis and indexicality (beyond) here and now (Studies in Pragmatics). Berlin, Leiden: Brill.
13. Lewandowski, W. & Fliessbach, J. (accepted).
In search of the hidden path: The zero-encoding construction in satellite-framed English and verb-framed French. Journal of Pragmatics.
12. Fliessbach, J., Tovena, L. M., & Fleury, D. (2025). Grammatical person as a clue to interpreting French how-questions. In Proceedings of the 29th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue – Full Papers. 6–16. Bielefeld, Germany. http://semdial.org/anthology/Z25-Fliessbach_semdial_3304.pdf (external link, opens in a new window)
11. Fliessbach, J., & Rockstroh, J. (2025). Verb influence on French wh-placement: a parallel corpus study. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (CLLT), 21(2), 361–399. doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0001 (external link, opens in a new window).
10. Auhagen, P. & J. Fliessbach. (2024). Structural and sociolectal limits of variability of que in Mexican Spanish noun clefts. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics 10(1). 1–28. doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.449 (external link, opens in a new window).
9. Fliessbach, J. & Tovena, L. M. & Fleury, D. & Linon, Y. (2024). Accounting for comment-questions (external link, opens in a new window). Proceedings of SemDial 2024 (TrentoLogue). Trento. Italy.
8. Thiberge, G., Brunetti, L., & Fliessbach, J. (2024). Différences fonctionnelles entre quasi-synonymes: les interrogatives de raison en français. (external link, opens in a new window) In 9e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française. Lausanne (01.07.-05.07.2024).
7. Fliessbach, J., Brunetti, L., & Yoo, H. (2024). On the overlapping discourse functions of Spanish 'cómo que' and French 'comment ça' interrogatives. (external link, opens in a new window) In K. Habicht, T. Hennoste, H. Metslang, & R. Pajusalu (Eds.), Open Linguistics. Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Language. Berlin: de Gruyter.
6. Fliessbach, J., García, N. M., & Uth, M. (2024). The Production of Post-Lexical Prosodic Prominence in Yucatec Maya and its Perception by Speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (external link, opens in a new window). International Journal of American Linguistics, 90(2), 185–226.
5. Fliessbach, Jan (2024): Mirativity, obviousness, and reversal as instances of contrast on different levels of meaning. Evidence from Spanish intonation. (external link, opens in a new window) In Jorina Brysbaert, Karen Lahousse (Eds.): On the role of contrast in Information Structure. Definition, types, encoding and annotation. 101–130. Berlin: de Gruyter (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs/TiLSM).
4. Uth, M., Gutiérrez-Bravo, R., & Fliessbach, J. (2024). On the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya. Frontiers in Language Sciences, 2. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/language-sciences/articles/10.3389/flang.2023.1286520/full (external link, opens in a new window)
3. Fliessbach, Jan (2023). The intonation of expectations: On marked declaratives, exclamatives, and discourse particles in Castilian Spanish. Open Romance Linguistics: Vol. 3. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/387 (external link, opens in a new window)
2. Feldhausen, Ingo, Jan Fliessbach & Maria del Mar Vanrell (Eds.) (2018). Studies in Laboratory Phonology: Vol. 6. Methods in prosody: A Romance language perspective (external link, opens in a new window). Berlin: Language Science Press.
1. Fliessbach, Jan (2018). Epistemic Stance in Italian and in the Mind. Book Review on Andrzej Zuczkowski, Ramona Bongelli, Ilaria Riccioni. Epistemic stance in dialogue: Knowing, unknowing, believing (Dialogue Studies 29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Pragmatics.Reviews, 6.1, 13-26. https://doi.org/10.11584/pragrev.2018.6.1.3 (external link, opens in a new window)
Software
2. Fliessbach, J. (2025). PolyMaus: Annotation and data extraction of MAUS and Polytonia output with Praat (external link, opens in a new window). Zenodo.
1. Rockstroh, J., & Fliessbach, J. (2024). OpuSearch: Application and GUI to generate and search alignments from OPUS OpenSubtitles (external link, opens in a new window). Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.12742554
Talks
25. Auhagen, P., Fliessbach, J., Uth, M. (2026). Regional Variation in Resumptive Relative Clauses in European Spanish: Evidence from Multi-Scalar Acceptability Judgements. Workshop‘Register at the Interface of Socio-Geographic Variation (external link, opens in a new window)’. Humboldt University of Berlin. 8 June 2026.
24. Fliessbach, J., Rockstroh, J., Tovena, L. M. & Fleury, D. (2025). How person and discourse role contribute to the interpretation of comment questions. Linglunch, Université Paris Cité. http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/node/7865 (external link, opens in a new window)
23. Fliessbach, J., Rockstroh, J. (2025). Exploring Language Variation with Chatbots: Opportunities for Linguistics and HCI. DHXpresso (external link, opens in a new window). GWDG. Göttingen
22. Fliessbach, J., Tovena, L. M., Fleury, D. (2025). Grammatical person as a clue to interpreting French how-questions. SemDial Bialogue, Bielefeld, 03.09.2025. https://purl.org/semdial/2025/proceedings (external link, opens in a new window)
21. Fliessbach, J., Rosemeyer, M. (2025). Interactional challenges with euphemisms:
The wh-diable/diantre ‘the hell’ alternation in French historical theater plays. Talk at SLE2025. Bordeaux, 29.08.2025. https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2025/08/book_of_abstracts_general_session-3.pdf (external link, opens in a new window)
20. Fliessbach, J., Auhagen, P., & Cano, I. (2025). Estudios de elicitación sintáctica y tareas cloze como pasos intermedios entre corpus y experimento: lecciones de la investigación de los complementantes relativos. Talk at XXIV. Deutscher Hispanistiktag, Sektion 6-LING: Los métodos mixtos en la descripción del español: casando la lingüística de corpus y la lingüística experimental. Universität Hamburg, 12.03.25, https://osf.io/3v5sa/ (external link, opens in a new window).
19. Fliessbach, Jan (2024, October). Deictic elements and non-canonical uses of French interrogatives. Presentation held at 'Conference Deixis and Indexicality (beyond) Here and Now'. Lyon.
18. Thiberge, G., Brunetti, L., & Fliessbach, J. (2024). Différences fonctionnelles entre quasi-synonymes: les interrogatives de raison en français. Presentation held at '9e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française'. Lausanne.
17. Fliessbach, Jan (2023, September). On “missing” verbs in French and Spanish how-that-interrogatives. Presentation held at '38th Romanistentag'. Leipzig.
16. Fliessbach, J., & Rockstroh, J. (2023, Juli). The placement of wh-objects in French partial interrogatives as a stance-taking device – a challenge for sociolinguistics. Presentation held at '18th International Pragmatics Conference'. Brussels.
15. Fliessbach, J. (2023, Juni). On the role of duration and length for the realization of contour tones in Yucatec Maya. Presentation held at 'Exploring the relation between duration and length across languages'. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
14. Fliessbach, J., & Rockstroh, J. (2023, März). On the role of verbs in French partial interrogative syntax: Presentation held at 'Linglunch LLF'. Paris.
13. Fliessbach, J., & Rockstroh, J. (2023, Januar). Tu sais quoi ? Qu’est-ce que tu racontes ? Qu’est-ce que tu as ?: Verb induced wh-placement patterns in French partial interrogatives. Presentation held at the 'Linguistic Lecture Series' of the Centre Language - Variation - Multilingualism, Potsdam.
12. Fliessbach, Jan (2022, Juli): R teaser. R und RStudio als Werkzeuge in der Statistik. Presentation held at 'Kolloquium Mehrsprachigkeit'. Universität Potsdam, Potsdam.
11. Fliessbach, Jan (2022, Mai): On sluicing and wh-stripping in Spanish and French. Presentation held at 'Linguistisches Kolloquium der Romanistik'. Universität zu Köln, Köln.
10. Fliessbach, Jan; Brunetti, Lisa; Yoo, Hiyon (2022, Mai): On the overlapping discourse functions of Spanish "cómo que" and French "comment ça (que)" interrogatives. Presentation held at 'Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Language and Culture'. Centre for Excellence in Estonian Studies, Tartu, Estonia.
9. Fliessbach, Jan (2022, März): Comparing non-canonical interrogatives in Spanish and French. Presentation at LingLunch, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle. Paris, France, 3/24/2022.
8. Fliessbach, Jan (2021). Mirativity, obviousness, and reversal as instances of contrast on different levels of meaning: Evidence from Spanish. Presentation at the ‘International workshop on the expression of contrast and the annotation of information structure in corpora’. Leuven, Belgium.
7. Fliessbach, J. (2020). A corpus based approach to the semantics of Spanish discourse particles and intonational contours. Poster and video presented at 'Sensus 2020: Formal Semantics and Pragmatics in Romance'. Amherst, United States.
6. Fliessbach, J. (2019, März). Sobre la independencia entre prosodia y sintaxis en exclamativas. Poster presented at 'XXII. Deutscher Hispanistentag - constelaciones, redes, transformaciones', Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin.
5. Fliessbach, J. (2017 , Juli). ¡Hombre, pues claro! - Una aproximación a la interacción entre partículas discursivas y patrones de entonación. XVIII Congreso de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de la América Latina, Bogotá, Colombia.
4. Fliessbach, J. (2017, Juni). From lab speech to dialogue corpora: Givenness and Obviousness in Castilian Spanish intonation. Poster präsentiert bei 'Phonetics and Phonology in Europe 2017'. Universität zu Köln, Köln.
3. Fliessbach, J. (2016, Juli). Mirativität und Fokus, Selbstverständlichkeit und Gegebenheit: Mit F0 Manipulation zur Kategorienbildung, Vortrag im Rahmen der 'Sommerschule des Deutschen Romanistenverbandes', Universität Wien, Wien, Österreich.
2. Fliessbach, J. (2016, März). Prosodie und Modalität in México D.F. – Forschung am Rande der Sprache?, Vortrag auf dem 'Forum Junge Romanistik 2016', Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Deutschland.
1. Reich, U., & Fliessbach, J. (2014, Januar). The Sound of truth. Focus and epistemic operators in the common ground as complementary meanings of intonation in romance languages. Vortrag auf dem Workshop zu 'Focus realization and interpretation in Romance and beyond', Universität zu Köln, Köln, Deutschland.
Teaching
University of Regensburg | |
| Winter 2026/27 | Introduction to French Linguistics Introduction to Spanish Linguistics Varieties of American Spanish (advanced seminar) Phonetics and Phonology of Spanish Pragmatics of Spanish: Context, Use and Variation (Introductory Seminar) Synchrony II: French (preparation for the state examination) Synchrony II: Spanish (preparation for the state examination) |
University of Potsdam | |
| Winter 2025/26 | Interrogative Sentences in Comparative Perspective: Spanish–French Lecture: Introduction to Linguistics (Romance Languages) |
| Summer 2025 | Statistical Foundations for Linguistics with R , Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Linguistic Perspectives on Textbooks and AI in Foreign Language Teaching (Spanish, French), Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| Winter 2024/25 | Lecture 'Introduction to linguistics (Romance languages)' (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Spanish Phonetics and Phonology (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| Summer 2024 | "Lecture Series in Linguistics", Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Variational Linguistics Spanish, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| Winter 2023/24 | Francophonie and Language Ideology, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Understanding Sentence Types and Teaching Them in Foreign Language Education, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| Summer 2023 | Sounds, Phrases, Rhythm: Comparative Phonologies of Romance Languages, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Variational Linguistics French, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| Winter 2022/23 | Interrogative Sentences in Comparative Perspective: Spanish–French, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Bachelor Colloquium Romance Linguistics, Colloquium (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| Summer 2022 | Corpus Linguistics of French, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Statistics for Linguistics with R, Seminar/Exercise (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
| Winter 2021/22 | French Syntax: Introduction and Advanced Topics, Seminar (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) Statistical Foundations of Linguistics, Lecture (PULS (external link, opens in a new window)) |
Freie Universität Berlin | |
| 04/2021 – 07/2021 | Aspects of French Syntax |
| 10/2020 – 02/2021 | Introduction to German Linguistics |
| 04/2020 – 07/2020 | Introduction to French Linguistics |
| 04/2019 – 07/2019 | Empirical Methods in Linguistics I |
| 10/2018 – 02/2019 | Empirical Methods in Linguistics II |
| 04/2018 – 07/2018 | Introduction to French Linguistics |
| 10/2017 – 02/2018 | Variational Linguistics Spanish |
| 04/2017 – 07/2017 | Introduction to Spanish Linguistics |
| 10/2017 – 02/2017 | Information Structure & Intonation in Romance Languages |
| 04/2016 – 07/2016 | Spanish Phonetics & Phonology |
Projects and memberships
Projects
2026-2029: Project D03 (external link, opens in a new window) in the CRC 1287 (external link, opens in a new window) investigating the impact of various Romance standards and individual standard orientations on the acceptability of resumption in relative clauses, together with Melanie Uth.
2024-2025: DAAD/CampusFrance project with Université Paris Cité and the University of Bremen/Digital Media Lab: PaCoCo: Parallel Corpus Exploration of Questions with French 'Comment' (external link, opens in a new window).
Memberships
Deutscher Romanistikverband (external link, opens in a new window) (DRV)
Deutscher Hispanistikverband (external link, opens in a new window) (DHV) - Arbeitsgruppe Digitale Romanistik (external link, opens in a new window)
Societas Linguistica Europaea (external link, opens in a new window) (SLE)
Organisation of conferences and events
Co-organiser of the lecture series ‘KI und Sprache’ (external link, opens in a new window), University of Potsdam, 6 May–15 July 2026
Co-organisation of the workshop ‘Adverbial clauses and prosody’ (external link, opens in a new window) with Łukasz Jędrzejowski, University of Potsdam, 12–13 March 2026
Contributed to the organisation ofXXII. Deutscher Hispanistentag (external link, opens in a new window), Free University of Berlin, 27–31 March 2019
Contributed to the organisation of the workshop‘Die lichtvolle Erkennung der Verschiedenheit’ (external link, opens in a new window) on language typology, marking the 250th anniversary of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s birth, Free University of Berlin, 19 June 2017
Contributed to the organisation of theXIX. Sociolinguistics Symposium (external link, opens in a new window), Freie Universität Berlin, 21–24 August 2012
Peer review
Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (2026, Routledge)
Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (2025, John Benjamins)
Language and Speech (2025, Sage)
Journal of Experimental Phonetics/Estudios de Fonética Experimental (2025, University of Barcelona)
6th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe conference (2024/25, PaPE)
53rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (2023, LSRL 53)
Manual of Classification and Typology of the Romance Languages (2023, De Gruyter)
Gender Prize of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Potsdam (2023–2025)
Hans-Jürgen Bachorski Prize (2023–2025)
Comprehensive Grammar Library (2021, Language Science Press)
Linguistica Latinoamericana (2021, De Gruyter)
Dialectologia et Geolinguistica (2018, De Gruyter)
Academic self-administration
Member of the Executive Board of the Centre for Language – Variation – Multilingualism, University of Potsdam (2024–2026)
Member of the Research and Early Career Commission, Faculty of Arts, University of Potsdam (2023–2025)
Representative of mid-level academic staff, Institute Council of the Institute for Romance Philology, Free University of Berlin (2017–2019)
Representative for mid-level academic staff, Academic Senate, Free University of Berlin (2019–2021)
Deputy Erasmus Coordinator, Institute of Romance Philology, Free University of Berlin (2019–2021)
Liaison Officer for the Ramon Llull Institute, Institute of Romance Philology, Free University of Berlin (2018–2020)