Back to Lena Kaltenbach - Anglistik IV - Universität Mannheim
My main research interest is variation and change in the argument structure and event structure of verbs. I carry out the majority of my research using a corpus- and dictionary-based approach. I mainly focus on English, but I am also interested in these topics from a cross-linguistic perspective including other Germanic and Romance languages.
During my student years, I developed an interest in interdisciplinary research at the interface between language change and contact studies and the cognitive mechanisms which may underlie language processing in the historical domain. I also have a lingering interest in written language production and variation in written data, especially data from non-standard and/or multilingual contexts.
A list of topics I am interested in:
SILPAC (Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change) is a Research Unit FOR 5157 established by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I am currently carrying out research as a member of project H3 of SILPAC, with Prof. Carola Trips as my supervisor.
The SILPAC research unit focuses on understanding how language input is structured and how it influences language processing, acquisition, and historical change. Project H3 focuses on contact-induced changes in the structure of the input due to the copying of argument structure of verbal prefixes and verb particle combinations from Old French to Middle English. This aligns closely with my research interests in verb argument structure and event structure, allowing me to explore these topics from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.
To learn more about the objectives and research agenda of SILPAC, you can visit the SILPAC-Website.
https://silpac.uni-mannheim.de/
Trips, C., Struik, T. & Kaltenbach L. (in prep). Language contact, bilingualism and code-switching. To be submitted to Glossa: Contact.
Struik, T. & Kaltenbach, L. (submitted). The results of contact: tracing changes in resultativity encoding in the history of English in contact with Old French. Diachronica.
Trips, C., Struik, T. & Kaltenbach, L. (submitted). Language contact and language change. Contribution to International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition.
Struik, T. & Kaltenbach, L. (2025). Per syntax ad semantics: The benefits of enriching the parsed corpora of historical English with lexical semantic annotation. Talk presented at ICAME 46, University of Vilnius.
Kaltenbach, L.(2025) Where is Path in Old and Middle English Motion Events? Reframing the Debate on Path Expression. Talk presented at LELPGC 25, University of Edinburgh.
Karkaletsou, F., Piccione, M., Kaltenbach, L., Allen, S., Trips, C. , & Rainsford, T. (2025). Do bilinguals exit or exit out? Evidence on double-framing in French. Talk presented at Psycholinguistics in Flanders (PiF) 2025, Lille, France.
Kaltenbach, L. (2024). Where is Path in Old English Motion Events?. Poster presented at the SILPAC Retreat 24, Fulda.
Kaltenbach, L. (2023). Effects of translation in the syntactic realization of Recipient arguments in Middle English: Searching for unique items in translated and non-translated texts. Talk presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Struik, T., Kaltenbach, L., & Trips, C. (2023). The results of contact: tracing changes in resultativity encoding in Middle and early Modern English in contact with Old French. Talk presented at Diachronic Generative Syntax 24, Université Paris Cité.
Kaltenbach, L., & Trips, C. (2020). Review of Hundt, Mollin & Pfenninger (2017),'The changing English language'. Journal of Historical Syntax, 4(7), 1-29.
June 2024**:** Co-organisation of Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS 25) 25–30 June 2024, University of Mannheim ( with Carola Trips, Tara Struik, and Charles Yang)
September 23: Co-organisation of Workshop “New methods for old languages: the comparability of data” at ICHL26 Heidelberg (with Alessia Cassará, Mariapaola Piccione & Tara Struik)
The Development of the Category “Path” in English
Syntax, Semantics, and Language Contact in Path Expression in the History of English
My PhD dissertation investigates how English expresses change-of-state events across historical stages, with a focus on the development of Path encoding in verbs and prepositional structures. Drawing on insights from generative syntax, semantics, and typology, I explore how the category of "Path" evolved in English, particularly from Old English (OE) to Middle English (ME), and the impact that contact with Old French (OF) had on this development.
The project combines:
Here are some preliminary findings I presented at the SILPAC Retreat 24 (Fulda, 24-26.07.2024).
In my master’s thesis, I focused on the potential of researching contact-induced variation in written data using a interdisciplinary approach and brought together a number of recent research trends in historical linguistics, contact studies and translation studies. To this end, I suggested a framework for comparing cross-linguistic structural effects in translation-based texts from modern and historical scenarios.
You can access a draft version of this project here.
My bachelor's thesis focused on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the English recipient passive from a diachronic and cross-linguistic perspective. It concentrated on the role of language contact in the form of the borrowing of Anglo- Norman verbs including their argument structure into Middle English. In a first step, the thesis established the necessary condition for English verbs to appear in the recipient passive as the general ability to signify a caused possession event type by selecting for a true recipient argument. In a second step, an explorative corpus analysis of two native and three French origin verbs from two Middle English corpora revealed the set of verbs which can form recipient passives as historically stable with regard to event type and semantic roles. By tendency, the verbs seem to form recipient passives as soon as the choice between expressing the recipient argument as either a prepositional phrase or a bare noun phrase becomes available, with native verbs lagging behind non-native verbs. This tendency fits in with recent assumptions about borrowing of argument structure and differences in argument realisation options across languages.
My thesis has been published as part of the student edition of MAPMAC and you can access it here.