On this year's annual meeting of the DGfS (German Linguistic Society) in Marburg, I was awarded the Wilhelm von Humboldt prize 2014 for my dissertation. I was very surprised when I got notified that the jury has selected my dissertation »Use-conditional meaning. Studies in multidimensional semantics« unanimously for the prize, especially since I didn't even know that I was suggested for the price in the first place!
I was especially stoked when I learned that besides the actual content, the jury especially mentions the high accessibility of the thesis. I actually tried hard to make the core ideas of my work understandable even without all those crazy formulas and to always put enough explanatory prose around the semantic derivations. Therefore, it is a good feeling that this seems to shine through :-)
The prize ceremony took place between the two plenary talks on Wednesday, March 5, at the Alte Aula of the University of Marburg.
During the ceremony, I had to present the dissertation in 10 minutes to an audience of linguists of all flavors. First I planed to really present the work, but quickly realize that this was not only a hopeless endeavor, but also the wrong take on such a presentation. I therefore decided to focus on the people and ideas that influenced and shaped me as a linguists and directly or indirectly had an influenced the final shape of my dissertation. The slides of the presentation can be found here. However, since they were in German, I will post an English version in form of a blog post soon.
Presenting my dissertation during the prize ceremony. Picture by Stefan Müller. See also his LingPhot blog.