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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesDepartment of German Language and Literature I

Max Bonke

Post-doctoral researcher

Project Propositional anaphora in negative polar contexts (project C10 in CRC 1252 Prominence in Language)

Department of German Language and Literature I
Linguistics

Office: 2.122 (Philosophikum)
E-Mail: mbonkeSpamProtectionuni-koeln.de

Research

  • Ellipsis: Gapping, Stripping, Topic Drop
  • Clause combining: Subordination (complementizers, factivity, mood selection, complement clause syntax) and Coordination (contrastiveness and parallelism)
  • Negation: NPIs, propositional anaphora
  • Cross-linguistic variation

Dissertation

Publications

  • Bonke, Max. Submitted. An experimental approach to factivity and mood selection in Spanish complement clauses. Isogloss. (Proceedings of Going Romance 2024.)
  • Bonke, Max. Forthcoming. The complementizer čto in Russian embedded gapping and stripping. In D. Seres, S. Milosavljević, J. Simić, M. Simonović, J. Stojković and J. Živojinović (eds.) Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2023. Berlin: Language Science Press. [pre-print]
  • Bonke, Max and Katharina Schaebbicke. Forthcoming. Beyond negation and verum: Can contrast license NPIs? Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 29. [PDF]
  • Bonke, Max and Sophie Repp. 2022. Complementizer deletion in embedded gapping in Spanish. The Linguistic Review 39/3. Special Issue: Empirical Approaches to Elliptical Constructions. 525-555. [link] [manuscript]

Presentations

  • Different sizes, different meanings? Structural variation in Spanish complement clauses. Clausal Complementation Across Categories. Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany. 19/20 June 2025.
  • Factivity and mood selection in Spanish complement clauses. Going Romance 38. Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal. 04 December 2024. (Poster)
  • NPIs in Contrast. Sinn und Bedeutung 29. Noto, Italy. 19 September 2024. (with Katharina Schaebbicke)
  • Verb type effects on complementizers in Spanish embedded gapping. Experimental and Corpus Approaches to Ellipsis 6. 21st International Congress of Linguists, Poznań, Poland. 12 September 2024.
  • Complementizers in Spanish gapping – Verb type effects and the role of factivity. LII Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística. [52nd Symposium of the Spanish Society of Linguistics.] Madrid, Spain. 25 January 2024.
  • Coordinated embedded CPs in Russian: Contrast, Ellipsis, Complementizers. Formal Descriptions of Slavic Languages 16. University of Graz, Austria. 29 November 2023.
  • Verb Ellipsis and Complementizers – Cross-linguistic Variation and Experimental Results. Joint colloquium of the German and English linguistics departments. Universität des Saarlandes, Germany. 15 November 2023. (invited)
  • Restrictions on subordinators in Spanish and Russian elliptical clauses. 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference. Leibnitz Institute for the German Language, Mannheim, Germany. 19 July 2023.
  • Gradual factivity and its effects on ellipsis in Spanish. Manchester Forum in Linguistics. University of Manchester, UK. 20 April 2023.
  • Complementizer Deletion in Embedded Gapping in Spanish. Experimental and Corpus-based Approaches to Ellipsis 3. online. 15 July 2020. (with Sophie Repp)

Workshop organization

  • Experimental and Corpus Approaches to Ellipsis 6. Workshop hosted at the 21st International Congress of Linguists. Poznań, Poland. 08-14 September 2024. (with Gabriela Bîlbîie)
  • Creativity and routine in proposition reconstruction under ellipsis. Workshop hosted at the 45. Jahreskonferenz der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft [45th annual conference of the German Linguistic Society]. University of Cologne, Germany. 08/09 March 2023. (with Volker Struckmeier)