Professor Daniel Gutzmann

Daniel Gutzmann completed his Master’s degree in German philology, philosophy and Indology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2008. In 2013, he completed his dissertation, which he wrote at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. In 2018, he habilitated at the University of Cologne, where he had previously worked as a substitute professor. In early 2022, he moved to the Heisenberg Professorship of “German Linguistics: German Language System” at Ruhr University Bochum.

His area of expertise is semantics; fundamental questions about linguistic meaning are the focus of his work. In addition, Gutzmann studies pragmatics, i.e. how the meaning of language is determined or changed by the context in which an utterance is made, and all the things one can do with language, for example, lying or insulting someone. He is a specialist in so-called expressive language, which expresses the attitude of speakers and is often emotional.

In his current research as part of the Heisenberg Project, he is mainly exploring the question of how the notion of context can be theoretically and formally modelled for conversations in which more than two people are involved. How and by what means – expressions, gestures, glances – can speakers change or listeners be activated, for example. To explore these questions, Daniel Gutzmann intends to combine methods of formal semantics/pragmatics with approaches from discourse/conversational linguistics.