About me

I am a linguist who is fascinated by lexical categorisation in English and across languages. Currently I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Zurich Centre for Linguistics at University of Zurich, where I am a member of an SNF-funded project on prototypes and parts of speech, led by Marianne Hundt, Lena Jäger, Alexis Hervais-Adelman and Fernando Zuñiga. The main goal of our project is to use Natural Language Processing and neurolinguistic evidence from three typologically very different languages (Basque, Chinese and English) to verify whether adjectives as a prototypically structured category exist.

Before Zurich, I completed PhD at the University of Edinburgh (2015-2019) under the supervision of Heinz Giegerich and Nikolas Gisborne. My main research interest is lexical categorisation and the interfaces of morphology, syntax, and semantics. My PhD project explores English -ing forms, with a focus on participles and gerunds. I also like word formation, particularly compounding.

Publications and talks

Monograph

Sennrich, X. 2022. The Many Faces of English -ing. [Topics in English Linguistics]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Talks

• English Language Research Group Meetings: talk on “Participles are Adjectives”. January 2019, University of Edinburgh.
• Linguistic and English Language Postgraduate Conference: talk on “Gerunds vs. Present Participles”. June 2016, University of Edinburgh.
• LangSoc Postgraduate Mini-Lecture Night: Talk on “Verb-Noun Compounding in English and German”. November 2015, University of Edinburgh
• The Language at Edinburgh Lunch: Poster on “Verb-Noun Compounding in English and German”. October 2015, University of Edinburgh.

Teaching

Tutoring at University of Edinburgh 2016-2019

2016 - 2019 LEL2A: Linguistic Theory and the Structure of English (BA lecture tutorial)

Teaching at University of Zurich

Autumn 2023 BA seminar focus on Language Structure ‘English word clases’

CV

Contact me

xin.sennrich@uzh.ch