Simon Bergqvist

Ph.D. student of German linguistics since September 2020. My research concerns German grammar, focusing on syntactic and semantic issues. In my dissertation project I investigate the usage of the subjunctive II in contemporary spoken German.

Research

Since 2020 I am a Ph.D. student at the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University, where I also did my bachelor’s and master’s studies.

My dissertation project, ”Der Konjunktiv II im gesprochenen Gegenwartsdeutsch”, aims at investigating the usage of the subjunctive II in contemporary spoken German. The material I work with comes from the corpus FOLK (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus gesprochenes Deutsch) and encompasses public, institutional and private conversations from the timeframe 2009–2019. My analysis of this material will show what verbs appear in the subjunctive II, how frequent these forms are across the different domains, and what factors motivate their use.

Another interest is grapholinguistics; in a 2020 paper I investigated to what extent Saterland Frisian literary texts correspond to the orthographic rules proposed by linguists.

Teaching

In the spring of 2021 I took Uppsala University’s academic teacher training course. Today I teach German grammar within the courses German A (morphology and syntax; in Uppsala as well as in Freiburg im Breisgau) and German B.

As a student I have for several semesters been active as a mentor organizing study meetings for students at the A course; this has given me experience in working with Supplemental Instruction (SI).

Cooperations and positions of trust

Since 2022 I am a member of the international Ph.D. student network at Institut für deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim.

Together with Julia Sjöberg I organize the Ph.D. student conference Grammatik im Diasystem which will take place at Uppsala University in September 2024.

Since 2021 I am the chair of the Ph.D. student association at the Department of Modern Languages, of which I am also a representative in the faculty level association HDR. Additionally, I was a Ph.D. student representative within the board of the Faculty of Languages during 2021–2022.

Miscellaneous

Outside of the university I am a summer tour guide at Mårbacka manor (since 2017) and a board member of Delblancsällskapet (the Delblanc society, since 2020).