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
  • Digital humanities, language corpora, corpus technology

My  current projects focus on:

Recent Publications in 2025

  • 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 in 2025

  • Workshop: "Demonstratives and Demonstrations in Interaction", organizer: Oliver Ehmer, April 2-3, 2025, U Osnabrück.
  • Workshop: "Enmiendas interactionales desde una perspectiva multimodal", organizer: Oliver Ehmer, April 9-10, 2025, U Osnabrück.
  • Meeting: "CoPreSpa meeting", Sub group meeting of the scientific network (DFG), organizer: Oliver Ehmer, April 11-13, 2025, U Osnabrück.
  • Workshop: "Netzwerktreffen für Doktorand*innen der Gesprächsforschung", organizer: Marius Müller & Henning Vahlenkamp. Key note: Jens Lanwer, May 22-24, 2025.
  • Talk: "Searching for word searches", 2nd 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, 2025, German-Italian Centre for the European Dialogue, Villa Vigoni (Italy), with Florence Oloff, Martin Pfeiffer & Katharina König.
  • Talk: "Shell-noun-constructions of the type 'cosa de' (working title)", 3nd Meeting of the scientific network (DFG) "CoPrEspa - The Dynamics of Prepositions and Prepositional Constructions in Spanish", organizer: María Del Carmen Mellado Blanco, October 2-3, 2025, U Santiago (Spain), with Philipp Dankel, Inga Hennecke & María Sol Sansiñena Pascual.
  • Workshop: "Particles, pronouns, interjections, connectors and the like. Minimal resources in talk-in-interaction", October 23-24, 2025.
  • Talk: "Wenn 'ich' ein anderer ist. Atypische Verwendungen der 1. Person Singular in spanischsprachigen Instruktionen", Meeting of the research group (DFG) "Praktiken der Personenreferenz: Personal-, Indefinit- und Demonstrativpronomen im Gebrauch", organizers: Susanne Güthner & Wolfgang Imo, November, 20-21, 2025, U Münster (Germany).

Events in 2026

  • Workshop: "Interaktionskolloquium", organizer: Oliver Ehmer, February, 18-20, 2026, U Osnabrück.
  • Talk: "Wortsuchen", 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.

    • For past events see here.