On December 10, Niklas Wiskandt, research associate in the Linguistics II group, defended his dissertation entitled “Alternations of object-experiencer predicates. Studies on detransitivization and light verb constructions in the psych domain.” This marks the successful completion of his PhD degree in General Linguistics. His PhD was supervised by PD Dr. Jens Fleischhauer and Prof. Dr. Kilu von Prince.

Niklas Wiskandt's cumulative dissertation consists of six research papers, five of which have already been published after peer review. They cover the syntactic variation of emotion predicates from a cross-linguistic perspective and develop a new theoretical analysis for the relationship between emotion verbs and lexically corresponding complex predicates. To this end, Niklas Wiskandt conducted several corpus studies and a typological study.