Interview: Uli Sauerland

Uli Sauerland became the leader of the semantics-pragmatics research group of the Center of General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, Germany in 2005. Sauerland received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1998 and has taught as a visiting professor at a number of universities including Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Vienna. He authored more than 80 reviewed publications in semantics, pragmatics and syntax including articles in Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language Semantics, and the International Journal of American Linguistics. Sauerland's work has been funded by a number of different grant agencies, such as the EU Commission and the European Science Foundation. Currently he is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF grant, Grant Nr. 01UG1411) and coordinates the national priority program XPrag.de (SPP 1727) that involves about 50 researchers and advances pragmatic and semantic theory by the use of experimental evidence. Since 2007, Sauerland has been involved in fieldwork on specific phenomena in underdescribed languages in Eastern Indonesia (Teiwa), Peru (Matses), and Brazil (Pirahã, Karitiana, and Kaingang). He hopes to continue to work intensively on Brazilian indigenous languages in the future