Associate Member

Pia Gehlbach works on iconicity and semantic conceptualization in sign language with a focus on German Sign Language. She holds a B.A. in English Philology and General Linguistics and a M.A. in English with a linguistic focus, both from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen where she now works as a member of the Sign Language Lab at the Department of German Philology. She is a member of the RTG 2070 Understanding Social Relationships. In her PhD project, she investigates the influence of sign language iconicity on the semantic conceptualization of various types of concepts, combining corpus-data analysis with an experimental approach. Her project aims at providing a systematic overview of the iconicity of the investigated signs, as well as to examine if, and how, this iconicity has an impact on the way in which a concept is semantically conceptualized.