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© RUB, Marquard

I’m a Junior Professor in Experimental Linguistics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Before, I was a postdoctoral researcher in formal semantics and pragmatics  in the project on pluralized mass nouns at Ulster University.

I obtained my PhD from the Universität Potsdam.

In my work, I combined the empirical research (experimental and field research) with the theoretical analysis of the language. I am mostly working on the semantics of common nouns,  non-asserted meaning components, (in)definites, information structure,  and aspectual reference.

Together with Mira Grubic and Reggie Duah, I co-founded and coordinate DFG Scientific Network Definiteness across Domains.

I also serve as Associate Editor at Glossa.

Publications

Journal papers

(resubmitted)Agata Renans, Akua Campbell & Sampson Korsah, Deriving (anti)-uniqueness: Demonstratives in Ga (Kwa)
2023Anne Mucha, Agata Renans & Jacopo Romoli. Sequence of tense and cessation implicatures: Evidence from Polish. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41, 267-346
2022Halima Husić & Agata Renans, The (in)defnite inferences of accusative and genitive in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 7(1)
2021Agata Renans. Definite descriptions of events: progressive interpretation in Ga (Kwa). Linguistics & Philosophy 44, 237-279, doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09287-2
2021Nadine Bade & Agata Renans. A cross-linguistic view on the obligatory insertion of additive particles - Maximize Presupposition vs. Obligatory Implicatures. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1):51, 1-24, doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.727
2020Agata Renans, Yagmur Sag, Nihan Ketrez, Lyn Tieu, Raffaella Folli, George Tsoulas, Hanna de Vries, Jacopo Romoli. Plurality and cross-linguistic variation: An experimental investigation of the Turkish plural. Natural Language Semantics 38(4), 307-342, doi.org/10.1007/s11050-020-09165-9
2020Jacopo Romoli & Agata Renans. Multiplicity and modifiers. Journal of Semantics 37(3), 455-474, doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa005
2019Agata Renans & Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss. Experimental studies on it-clefts and predicate interpretation. Semantics & Pragmatics 12(11), 1-56, doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.11.
2019Mira Grubic, Agata Renans and Reginald Akuoko Duah. Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo. Linguistics 57(1), 221-268
2018Agata Renans, Jacopo Romoli, Maria-Margarita Makri, Lyn Tieu, Hanna de Vries, Raffaella Folli, George Tsoulas. The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 3(1): 103, 1-34
2018Agata Renans. Two types of choice-functional indefinites: evidence from Ga (Kwa). Topoi 37, 405-415
2017Agata Renans. Exclusive particles in Ga (Kwa). Journal of Semantics 34(4), 555-585

Conference proceedings

2024Agata Renans, In search of exclusive plural — insights from Hausa, In Lecavelier, Jeanne, Niklas Geick, Mira Grubic, Prarthanaa Bharadwaj, Malte Zimmermann, (eds.) Proceedings of TripleA 10: Fieldwork perspectives on the semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian languages, 142-158
2021Reginald Akuoko Duah, Mira Grubic, Agata Renans. The combination of indefinite and definite determiners in Akan, The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 7
2021Mira Grubic, Reginald Akuoko Duah, Agata Renans , The combination of indefinite and definite ‘determiners’ — a cross-linguistic study, Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 25
2019Carla Bombi, Mira Grubic, Agata Renans & Reginald Akuoko Duah. The semantics of the clausal determiner no in Akan (Kwa), In M. T. Espinal, E. Castroviejo, M. Leonetti, L. McNally & C. Real-Puigdollers (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 23, vol. 1, 181-199
2018Susanne Genzel, Agata Renans & Frank Kügler, Focus and its prosody in Akan and Ga, In K. Klessa, J. Bachan, A. Wagner, M. Karpiński & Daniel Śledziński (eds.), 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody, 724-728
2017Agata Renans, George Tsoulas, Raffaella Folli, Nihan Ketrez, Lyn Tieu, Hanna de Vries & Jacopo Romoli, Turkish plural nouns are number-neutral: experimental data, In Alexandre Cremers, Thomas van Gessel & Floris Roelofsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, 365-374
2017Agata Renans, Nadine Bade & Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss, Universals in pragmatics: Maximize Presupposition vs. Obligatory Implicatures, In Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (ed.), Proceedings of GLOW in Asia XI vol II, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 85: 147–161
2016Agata Renans & Mira Grubic, Definiteness marking on VPs/TPs in Ga and Ngamo, In Vera Hohaus & Wanda Rothe (eds.) The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 3 , 1-15
2016Agata Renans, Modeling the exhaustivity inference of clefts: evidence from Ga (Kwa), In Polina Berezovskaya, Nadine Bade & Anthea Schöller (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 20, 569-588
2016Agata Renans, A cross-categorial definite determiner: evidence from Ga (Kwa), In M. Moroney, C. Little, J. Collard & D. Burgdorf (eds.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 26, 23-42
2015Agata Renans, Three types of indefinites: evidence from Ga (Kwa) In Thomas Brochhagen, Floris Roelofsen & Nadine Theiler (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, 343-352
2015Agata Renans, Imperfective in Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo), In Eva Csipak & Hedde Zeijlstra (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 19, 481-498
2014Agata Renans, The semantics of common nouns in Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo) and their interaction with exclusive particles, In U. Etxeberria, A. Falaus, A. Irurtzun & B. Leferman (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 18, 340-358
2012Agata Renans, Projective Behaviour of Nur - Quantitative Experimental Research In M. Aloni, V. Kimmelman, F. Roelofsen, G. W. Sassoon, K. Schulz & M. Westera (eds.), Postproceedings of the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium, 190-200
2011Agata Renans, Projective Meaning of Only - Evidence from Polish, Proceedings of ESSLLI 2011: Workshop on Projective Content, 129-140

Books and thesis

2016Agata Renans, Exhaustivity. On exclusive particles, clefts, and progressive aspect in Ga (Kwa), Universitätsverlag Potsdam
2011Agata Renans, Malte Zimmermann & Markus Greif, Questionnaire on Focus Semantics, Working Papers of the SFB 632, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) 15, Universitätsverlag Potsdam

Edited Volumes

2012Balbach, M., Benz, L., Genzel, S., Grubic, M., Renans, A. Schalowski, S., Stegenwallner, M. & Zeldes (eds.), Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on theory, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) 17, Universitätsverlag Potsdam

Talks

Invited Talks

2023Bare Nouns in Ga, Universität Potsdam
2023In search of the exclusive plural: A meaning of plural across languages, Universität zu Köln
2023Plurality across languages — insights from Hausa, TripleA Workshop for Semantic Fieldworkers 10, University of Potsdam
2023Plurality across languages — insights from Hausa, University of Ghana
2022Actuality entailments and aspect, Universität Düsseldorf
2021Event semantics, actuality entailments, and aspect, Universität Potsdam
2020Event semantics and actuality entailments, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Department of Philosophy
2019Types of predicates (distributive vs. non-distributive) and theories of exhaustivity, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
2019Exhaustivity of clefts and interpretation of predicates, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
2019Clefts and interpretation of predicates, University of British Columbia
2018An implicature analysis of the inference of genitive and accusative in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Ulster University
2018Inferences of accusative and genitive in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Universität Potsdam
2017It-clefts with Collective and Distributive Interpretation: Experimental Studies, Universität Bielefeld,
2017Testing the abundance inference of pluralized mass nouns in Greek, Universität Düsseldorf
2017Accounting for inferences of pluralized count and mass nouns : Evidence from Greek, Universität Leipzig
2017It-clefts with Collective and Distributive Interpretation: Experimental Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2017Universals in pragmatics: Maximize Presuppositions vs. Obligatory Implicatures in Ga (Kwa) and German, The Ohio State University
2016A cross-categorial definite determiner in Ga (Kwa), University of York
2014On the semantics of exclusive particles in Ga, University of Ghana, Legon
2013On the semantics of common nouns in Ga and their interaction with exclusive particles, University of Utrecht

Conference Presentations

2024Deriving (anti)-uniqueness: Demonstratives in Ga (with Sampson Korsah and Akua Campbell), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29, Noto
2024Bare Nouns in Ga (with Sampson Korsah and Akua Campbell), Definiteness across domains, Berlin
2024Clausal determiners in Akan, Ga, and Ngamo (with Carla Bombi, Mira Grubic, Reginald Akuoko Duah), Definiteness across domains, Accra
2023Two types of definites — cross-linguistic experimental study (with F. Schwarz, H. Abubakari, D. Ahn, F. Bergsma, N. Chanchaochai, R. A. Duah, I. Driemel, L. Geist, M. Grubic, S. Korsah, S-Y. Lam, C. Meier, Y. Sağ, A. Saha, R. Šimík, A. Simonenko), Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing
and Learning (X-PPL), Zurich
2023Demonstratives in Ga (with Akua Campbell and Sampson
Korsah), Definiteness across domains, Bochum
2023Partitives, quantifiers, and numerals—an experimental study (with Mira Grubic), DGfS, Workshop on "Divide and Count: On the (Morpho-)Syntax and Semantics of Division, Plurality and Countability"
2022Definites and demonstratives in Ga (with Akua Campbell & Sampson Korsah), Scientific Network "Definiteness Across Domains"
2020Actuality Entailments without Aspect? Experimental Evidence from German (with Anne Mucha), Events and Event Structure at the Limits of Grammar, Oxford
2020The combination of indefinite and definite ‘determiners’ — a cross-linguistic study (with Mira Grubic and Reginald Akuoko Duah), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 25, Special session: Semantics of Understudied Languages and Semantic Fieldwork, London
2020The combination of indefinite and definite determiners in Akan (with Mira Grubic and Reginald Akuoko Duah), The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 7, Tübingen
2019Testing the implicature approach to Sequence of Tense (with Anne Mucha and Jacopo Romoli), poster presentation, The 8th Experimental Pragmatics Conference (XPrag2019), Edinburgh
2019The inferences of accusative and genitive in acc/gen alternation in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (with Halima Husic), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) 28, New York
2019The definite interpretation carried by accusative is an implicature - evidence from Bosnian-Croation-Serbian (with Halima Husic), 41st Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), Workshop on Sorting out Definiteness, Bremen
2018The semantics of the clausal determiner no in Akan (Kwa) (with Carla Bombi, Mira Grubic and Reginald Akuoko Duah), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 23, Barcelona
2018Clausal determiners in Akan (Kwa) (with Carla Bombi, Mira Grubic & Reginald Akuoko Duah), The Semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 5, Konstanz
2018Focus and its prosody in Akan and Ga (with Susanne Genzel and Frank Kügler), Speech Prosody 9, Poznań
2018Turkish plural nouns are number-neutral: experimental data (with George Tsoulas, Raffaella Folli, Nihan Ketrez, Lyn Tieu, Hanna de Vries and Jacopo Romoli), Linguistic Evidence, Tübingen
2017Turkish plural nouns are number-neutral: experimental data (with George Tsoulas, Raffaella Folli, Nihan Ketrez, Lyn Tieu, Hanna de Vries and Jacopo Romoli), 21st Amsterdam Colloquium
2017The plural inferences of count and mass nouns are implicatures: Evidence from Greek (with Jacopo Romoli, Maria-Margarita Makri, Lyn Tieu, Hanna de Vries, Raffaella Folli, George Tsoulas), The 48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 48), Reykjavík
2017Abundance inferences are scalar implicatures: Evidence from child and adult Greek (with Jacopo Romoli, Maria-Margarita Makri, Lyn Tieu, Hanna de Vries, Raffaella Folli, George Tsoulas), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 22, Potsdam/Berlin
2017Testing the abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns in Greek (with Jacopo Romoli, Maria-Margarita Makri, Lyn Tieu, Hanna de Vries, Raffaella Folli, George Tsoulas), The 2017 annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), Kent
2017 Presupposition triggers in a cross-linguistic perspective: Maximize Presupposition vs. Obligatory Implicatures in Ga (Kwa) (with Nadine Bade and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss), 39th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), Workshop on Secondary Information and Linguistic Encoding, Saarbrücken
2017 It-clefts with Collective and Distributive Interpretation: Experimental Studies (with Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss), Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Presuppositions, Genoa
2017Cross-linguistic variation in pragmatics: Maximize Presupposition vs. Obligatory Implicatures in Ga (Kwa) (with Nadine Bade and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss), poster presentation, Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) in Asia XI, Singapore
2017 Cross-linguistic variation in pragmatics: Maximize Presupposition vs. Obligatory Implicatures in Ga (Kwa) (with Nadine Bade and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss), Workshop on Cross-linguistic Pragmatics, Berlin
2016 Exhaustivity in it-cleftts with collective and distributive predicates: An experimental study (with Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss), International workshop on non-prototypical clefts, Leuven
2016 Definiteness Marking on VPs/TPs in Ga and Ngamo (with Mira Grubic), The Semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 3, Tübingen
2016 Focus/background marking in Akan, Ga (Kwa), and Ngamo (West-Chadic) (with Susanne Genzel, Mira Grubic and Reginald Duah), Budapest-Potsdam-Lund Linguistics Colloquium, Budapest
2016 A cross-categorial definite determiner: evidence from Ga (Kwa), poster presentation, Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 26, University of Texas at Austin
2016Prosodic focus marking in Ga, Akan & Ngamo (with Susanne Genzel and Mira Grubic), Prosody and Information Structure in Stuttgart (PINS)
2015 Three types of indefinites: evidence from Ga (Kwa), 20th Amsterdam Colloquium
2015 Reference to events in Ga and Ngamo (with Mira Grubic), Workshop on Event Semantics, Stuttgart
2015 Modeling the exhaustivity inference of clefts: Evidence from Ga, poster presentation, Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 20, Tübingen
2015 Focus marking strategies in selected African languages (with Susanne Genzel and Mira Grubic), SFB 632 Final Conference, Berlin
2015 Cross-linguistic research in Potsdam (with Mira Grubic and Anne Mucha), host talk at The Semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 2, Potsdam
2014 Imperfective in Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo), Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 19, Göttingen
2014 Imperfective in Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo), The Semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 1, Tübingen
2014 Exclusive Focus Particles in Ga (Kwa), Focus Sensitive Expressions from a Cross Linguistic Perspective, Tel Aviv
2013 Types of Common Nouns in Ga, Countability Workshop, Düsseldorf
2013 The Semantics of Common Nouns in Ga and their Interaction with Exclusive Particles, poster presentation, Sinn und Bedueutung (SuB) 18, Vitoria-Gasteiz
2013Functions of Exclusives in Ga, poster presentation, Semantics and Pragmatics session, International Congress of Linguists (ICL) 19, Geneva
2013Common Nouns in Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Mass, Count and More, 44th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), Washington
2012Projective Behaviour of Nur, poster presentation, LOT Winter School, Tilburg
2011Projective Behaviour of Nur - Quantitative Experimental Research, 18th Amsterdam Colloquium
2011Projective Meaning of Only - Evidence from Polish, poster presentation, Workshop on Projective Meaning, ESSLLI, Ljubljana

Teaching

Teaching

2024, (Fall)Introduction to semantics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Introduction to event semantics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2024, SpringMethods of linguistics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Definites and demonstratives across languages, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2023, FallModality, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Bare nouns across languages, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2023 SpringMethods of linguistics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Talking about numbers and plurality, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2023Temporal semantics,
Plurality and quantification (German-African Winter School, by invitation)
2022, FallTopics in semantics of under-studied languages, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Non-assertive meaning components, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2021, SpringMethods of linguistics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2020, FallIntroduction to indefinites, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Introduction to pluractionality, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2020, SpringPragmatics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Talking about events - introduction to event semantics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2019, FallEvent semantics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Definiteness across domains and languages, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2018, FallFieldwork semantics and field research methodologies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Topics in semantics of West African languages, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2018, ESSLLIPlurality: theoretical and experimental perspective (with Jacopo Romoli), European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) 30, Sofia University "St. Kl. Ohridski", Bulgaria
2018, SpringLinguistic Methods II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Plurality (Proseminar), Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2015, SpringMethodologies in semantic field research, University of Potsdam
2014, FallProjective meaning, University of Potsdam
2014, SpringPlurality, University of Potsdam
2012, FallProjective meaning, University of Potsdam

Contact

Please find my contact details at the bottom of the page.