Gabriela Soare

wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Lehrstuhlvertretung (Prof. Dr. E. Stark)

gabriela.soare-laenzlinger@uzh.ch

Romanisches Seminar
Zürichbergstrasse 8
CH - 8032 Zürich

Office: ZUG-F-33

Office hours: on Tuesdays, 3:45 - 4:30 & available online

Dr. Gabriela Soare holds a PhD degree in general linguistics from the University of Geneva, awarded in 2009. Her research lies at the interface between syntax and information structure, with a particular focus on the comparative syntax of Romance languages. She has been especially interested in the mechanisms and constraints of wh-movement, including the behaviour of multiple wh-constructions and the distinctive syntactic properties of some special interrogative elements, such as why and its counterpart in Romanian. Her work aims to uncover how syntactic configurations interact with discourse-driven considerations, contributing to a deeper understanding of variation across Romance and beyond.

A central line of inquiry in her work involves wh-extraction asymmetries, which she investigates through the lens of locality effects and feature-based Relativised Minimality, with a view to arrive at a fine-grained scale of extractability form wh-islands, esp. in Romance languages and English.

In addition to theoretical syntax, she has engaged with psycholinguistic dimensions of sentence processing, investigating, for instance, interference effects in subject–verb agreement in French. This line of research seeks to bridge formal syntactic theory with experimental findings, illuminating how grammatical knowledge is deployed in real-time language use.

Dr. Gabriela Soare has of recent developed a strong interest in second and third language (L2/L3) acquisition, with a focus on interlanguage development and its implications for language teaching. She is particularly drawn to how learners acquire complex syntactic phenomena and how insights from generative grammar can inform pedagogical approaches in multilingual settings.

Books & Peer-reviewed book chapters

Soare, Gabriela & Christopher Laenzlinger. To appear. “Some notes on the modal existential wh construction in two Romance languages.” In Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci & Andrew Nevin (eds) The Ziggurat of Grammar. In honor of Ur Shlonsky. John Benjamins.

Soare, Gabriela 2021. Why Is ‘Why’ Unique? Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties. (ed.) Mouton de Gruyter. 318p.https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110675160

Soare, Gabriela & Christopher Laenzlinger. “The order of multiple fronted wh-phrases and the scale of extractability from wh-islands. 2022. In G. Alboiu, D. Isac, A. Nicolae, M. Tanase-Dogaru & A. Tigau (eds), A Life In Linguistics. A Festschrift for Alexandra Cornilescu on Her 75^th Birthday. Bucharest University Press. 537-561.

Soare, Gabriela. 2021. “Introduction”. In Why Is ‘Why’ Unique? Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties. In Gabriela Soare (ed.), 1-23. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110675160

Laenzlinger, Christopher & Gabriela Soare. 2016. “A feature-based account of weak islands.” In Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot, Stephanie Durrlemann-Tame & Christopher Laenzlinger (éds.), Formal Models in the Study of Language. Papers dedicated to Jacques Moeschler. 11-33, Berlin: Springer.

Soare, Gabriela. 2015. “Particles and Parameters in Wh-Questions.” In Sylvie Hancil, Alexander Haselow & Margje Post (eds.) Final Particles. 333-359. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Soare, Gabriela. 2014. “Person Imposters: The View from Two Romance Languages.”  In Chris Collins (ed.) Cross-Linguistics Studies of Imposters and pronominal Agreement. 144-173. Oxford University Press.

Peer-reviewed journal articles - selection

Hugues, Peter, Christopher Laenzlinger & Gabriela Soare. To appear. “L2 Acquisition of the Sequencing of Postnominal Adjectives in French by English-Speaking Learners.” Generative Grammar in Geneva.

Soare, Gabriela. 2021. Introduction. In Gabriela Soare (éd.) Why is ‘why’ unique? Its syntactic and semantic properties. 1-23. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Laenzlinger, Christopher & Gabriela Soare. 2019. “Interlangue et enseignement des langues en contexte plurilingue.” Nouveaux Cahiers De Linguistique Française, 33, 353-380.

Soare, Gabriela. 2015. “Le rôle des éléments nuls à l’intérieur de quelques syntagmes nominaux et leurs effets sur l’accord sujet-verbe en français et en roumain.” In Gina Schneider et al. (ed.) Vox et Silentium. Etude de linguistique et littérature romanes. 211-227. Berne: Peter Lang.

Lahousse, Karen, Christopher Laenzlinger & Gabriela Soare. 2014. “Intervention at the Periphery.” Lingua 143, 56-85.

Gabriela, Soare & Jacques Moschler 2013. “Figement syntaxique, sémantique et pragmatique.”  Pratique 159/160. 1-21.

Shlonsky, Ur & Gabriela Soare. 2011. “Where’s ‘why’?” Linguistic Inquiry 42, 651-669.

Franck, Julie, Gabriela Soare, Ulrich-Heinrich Frauenfelder & Luigi Rizzi. 2010. “Object interference: The role of intermediate traces of movement.” Journal of Memory and Language 62, 166-182.

Seretan, Violeta, Eric Wehrli, Luka Nerima & Gabriela Soare. 2010. “FipsRomanian: Towards a Romanian Version of the Fips Syntactic Parser.” Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). 1972-1977.

PhD Thesis

Soare, Gabriela. 2009. The Syntax-Information Structure Interface: A Comparative View from Romanian. Thèse de doctorat. Université de Genève.

University of Zürich - Romanisches Seminar

Univerity of Geneva - English department & Linguistics department