Prof. Dr. Sophie Repp
Professor of German Linguistics
Chair of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS)
Institute for German Language and Literature I
Albertus Magnus Platz
D-50923 Cologne
Office: Philosophikum, Room 2.119
Tel: +49 221 470-5235
Fax: +49 221 470- 5107
E-Mail: sophie.repp domain is: uni-koeln.de
Main research topics
- Semantics & pragmatics: non-assertive speech acts, ellipsis, negation, information structure, particles
- Syntax: ellipsis, negation
- Prosody: non-assertive speech acts, information structure, prominence
- Co-speech gesture: Audiovisual prosodie (prominence), speech acts
- Quantitative data (experimental, corpus)
Recent Publications
- Canes-Nápoles, Amalia & Sophie Repp (Accepted). Object realisation in spoken Guadeloupan French: Evaluating NLP models for an under-resourced variety. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2026.
- Lau, Emily, Judith Schlenter, Johannes, Heim & Sophie Repp (Accepted). The interpretation of prenuclear accents in English (biased) questions. Speech Prosody 2026.
- Ulbrich, Christiane, Jörn Krantz, Heiko Seeliger & Sophie Repp (Accepted). Beyond F0: Voice-quality bundles as prominence cues in German. Speech Prosody 2026.
- Gipper, Sonja, T. Mark Ellison, Tobias-Alexander Herrmann, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Petra B. Schumacher & Sophie Repp (2026). Why ellipsis? Interactional function predicts choice of syntactic form in conversation. Discourse and Dialogue 17(1) 54–88. https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2026.102
- Repp, Sophie & Heiko Seeliger (2025). Modal particle meets prosody: Speech act modification in declarative questions. Proceedings of Tone and Intonation 3.
- Heim, Johannes, Judith Schlenter & Sophie Repp (2025). Prosodic variation in negative and positive polarity questions in English. Proceedings of Tone and Intonation 3.
- Loos, Cornelia & Sophie Repp (2025). Beyond yes and no: Multimodal multilexical polar responses in German. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 29. pp. 899-916.
- Repp, Sophie & Ljudmila Geist (2025). Negative polar questions in Russian: Question bias and question concern. In Tue Trinh, Anton Benz, Daniel Goodhue, Kazuko Yatsushiro & Manfred Krifka (eds.) Biased Questions. Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling. Language Science Press. pp. 101-140.
- Loos, Cornelia, Markus Steinbach & Sophie Repp (2024). Polar response strategies across modalities: Evidence from German Sign Language (DGS). Language 100(3), 433-467. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2024.a937185
- Seeliger, Heiko & Sophie Repp (2024). Givenness perception in German declaratives and exclamatives. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024, 672-676. DOI: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-136
Current research projects
QuBisM - Questions, Bias, Multimodality: Negotiating Meaning in Interaction
Research project: collaboration with Johannes Heim (Aberdeen) and Rebecca Woods (Newcastle)
Funded by AHRC and DFG; 2025-2028.
Interaction of segmental and suprasegmental prominence-lending features in non-assertive speech acts
Project A06 in the CRC 1252 (Prominence in Language)
Propositional anaphora in negative polar contexts
Project C10 in the CRC 1252 (Prominence in Language)
Office hours: By appointment (by mail).
Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society 2023 in Cologne
The university of Cologne is hosting the 45. annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) 7.-10. March 2023. (https://dgfs2023.uni-koeln.de/) . The topic is linguistic creativity and routine.