About

Prof. Dr. Oliver Ehmer

© Oliver Ehmer

I am a full professor in Romance Linguistics at the University of Osnabrück ( Institut für Romanistik und Latinistik). My research focuses on language in its context of use, mainly in oral communication but also in written media. I am inspired by interactional, cognitive and usage-based linguistic approaches.

On November 25, 2021 I was accepted into the   Heisenberg programme (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The funding is awarded for 5 years (04/2022-03/2027).

My research interests include:

  • Linguistic structure, social interaction and cognition
  • Language variation and change
  • Sociolinguistics and Discourse analysis
  • Digital humanities, language corpora and corpus technology

My  current projects focus on:

  • Requests for action in interaction and language change
  • Instructions and knowledge in interaction
  • Diachony of imperative discourse markers
  • Mobilization and progressivity in interaction
  • Word searches and repair in interaction
  • Tag questions and interrogatives

Recent Publications

  • Ehmer, Oliver / Birkner, Karin (2025): Existential-attributive constructions and positioning. Open Linguistics, 11 (1), 1-24, with Karin Birkner. Journal (open access).
  • Ehmer, Oliver (2025): Marking action accomplishment with non-lexical vocalizations. Interactional Linguistics, 5 (1-2), 22–68, Journal (open access).
  • Ehmer, Oliver (2025): Request for confirmation sequences in Castilian Spanish. Open Linguistics, 11, 1-44, Journal (open access).

    • For a complete list of publications see here.

Events

2026
  • Workshop: Interaktionskolloquium, organizer: Oliver Ehmer, February 18-20, 2026, U Osnabrück.
  • Workshop: Social metadata in Interactional Linguistics, organizer: Oliver Ehmer, April 20-21, 2026, U Osnabrück.
  • Talk: Searching for word searches, 3rd conference in the series 'Aux frontières de la langue parlée: Pratiques de reformulation et recherches de mot dans une perspective cross-linguistique et multimodale', organizers: Heike Baldauf, Florence Oloff & Sara Merlino, June 16-19, 2026, German-Italian Centre for the European Dialogue, Villa Vigoni (Italy), with Florence Oloff, Martin Pfeiffer & Katharina König.
  • Talk: Stance taking and repair. Spanish bah as a minimal resource in conversation, International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA 2026), Alberta, Canada, in the panel 'Minimal Resources in Interaction: Diversity in Language and Action', panel organizers: Elwys De Stefani, Florence Oloff & Ana Cristina Ostermann, June 23-29, 2026.
2027
  • Workshop: Maps and visualisations. Modelling functional networks in usage-based approaches to language, organizers: Antje Dammel, Oliver Ehmer, Katharina König & Jörg Zinken January 20-22, 2027, U Münster.
Past events

See here