Thanks for coming to my website! My name is András Bárány (pronounced [ˈɒndraːʃ ˈbaːraːɲ]) and I’m currently a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (roughly a lecturer) at the linguistics department of Bielefeld University. My research focuses on cross-linguistic variation and its limits, particularly with respect to morphosyntactic phenomena. I’m particularly interested in whether theories of grammar make correct predictions with respect to what types of grammars are attested or not, hopefully bridging theoretical morphosyntax and linguistic typology.

The phenomena I study include case, agreement, and their interaction, as well as ditransitive constructions, morphosyntactic alignment, the relationship between syntax and information structure, and possessive constructions.

Portrait of András Bárány
Fig. 1: This is me.

I’m part of the DFG Sonder­forschungs­bereich (collaborative research centre) Linguistic Creativity in Communication from April 2024 onwards. My project Creativity in (morpho)syntactic variation: The role of analogy (with Jutta-Maria Hartmann) investigates whether analogical reasoning is used to create novel, grammatical structures.

Previous positions

From September 2019 to September 2020, I was a post-doc at Leiden University, working on a project on ditransitive constructions awarded through LEaDing Fellows, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action COFUND programme, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.

Before that, I was a post-doctoral researcher and research associate at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), working on Irina Nikolaeva’s AHRC-funded project Prominent Possessors (see also here).

My monograph Person, Case, and Agreement was published in late 2017 with Oxford University Press. It provides a novel analysis of differential object agreement in Hungarian and discusses its relation to inverse agreement and global case splits in other languages, and what these phenomena can tell us about case-marking and agreement. You can find some more information about the book here.

I did my PhD in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, as a member of the ReCoS project. ReCoS dealt with comparative syntax and developed a novel approach to parametric variation.

In my PhD dissertation, Differential object marking in Hungarian and the morphosyntax of case and agreement, I explored the cross-linguistic variation of different phenomena relating to agreement and case-marking in a number of languages, including differential object marking (DOM, see Wikipedia), inverse agreement, and global case splits.

After finishing my PhD I spent a year at the (former) Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, as part of a group studying syntactic change in Uralic languages (under PI Katalin É. Kiss).

You can access my full CV here (March 2024).