Principal Investigator
Cornelia Loos received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. After completing postdoctoral projects on aspects of the syntax and semantics of German Sign Language (DGS) in Göttingen as well as on corpus-linguistic approaches to sign languages as a member of the DGS-corpus project in Hamburg, she held a position as PI of a research project on simultaneous event encoding in DGS using bimanual signs (ViCom Phase I). Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher and PI at the University of Cologne. Her research interests cluster around the syntax-semantics interface, focusing on experimental semantics and pragmatics as well as lexical semantics. She works predominantly on signed languages and has investigated topics such as word class and sentencehood in American (ASL) and German Sign Language (DGS), the syntax and semantics of resultative constructions in these two languages, the influence of iconicity and simultaneity on event encoding in DGS and Uruguayan Sign Language (LSU), and, most recently, on response elements and NPIs in DGS.
About
University of Cologne
cornelia.loos@uni-koeln.de
Selected Publications
Loos, C. and D.J. Napoli. 2025. Who’s going the distance here? Virtual reality and the visual vernacular. Cognitive Linguistics 37(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2024-0007.
Lettow, I. and C. Loos. 2025. A ministry of not-so-silly walks: An investigation of the use of 1 vs. V-classifiers in representations of motion and location events in German Sign Language (DGS). Open Linguistics 11 20250049. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2025-0049
Loos, C., Steinbach, M. and S. Repp. 2024. Polar response strategies in German Sign Language (DGS). Language 100(3): 433-467.
Loos, C. and D.J. Napoli. 2023. Depicting translocating motion in sign languages. Sign Language Studies24(1)
Loos, C. 2022. Sizing up adjectives: Delimiting the adjective class in American Sign Language. Sign Language & Linguistics.
Loos, C. and D.J. Napoli. 2021. Expanding Echo: Coordinated Head Articulations as Nonmanual Enhancements in Sign Language Phonology. Cognitive Science 45(5). doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12958.
Loos, C. 2020. Quite a mouthful: Comparing speech act verbs in Nederlandse Gebarentaal and American Sign Language. Linguistische Berichte.
Loos, C., Cramer, J.M., and D.J. Napoli. 2019. Taboo terms in German Sign Language: Exploiting phonology. Cognitive Linguistics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2018-0077