Richard Waltereit

Prof. Dr. Richard Waltereit is a Professor of Romance Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, affiliated with the Institut für Romanistik. He leads the Integrated Graduate School within the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation”. His research focuses on language change in Romance languages, particularly grammaticalization, reanalysis, and the history of discourse markers. He holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin (1997) and habilitation from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (2002). Before joining Humboldt in 2017, he was a Professor at Newcastle University (2006-2017).

His academic work spans monographs, edited volumes, and over 50 peer-reviewed articles. Key projects include the CRC 1412’s Project B06 on cross-linguistic diachrony of logical particles. He co-edits the Studia Linguistica Romanica and serves on editorial boards of several linguistics journals. His teaching emphasizes historical syntax, pragmatics, and Romance linguistics.

Research interests include: grammaticalization theory, diachronic syntax/pragmatics, discourse markers, French/Italian historical linguistics, and register variation. He has supervised numerous PhD students and organized international conferences on linguistic change and Romance studies.

Current roles: Principal Investigator in CRC 1412, Co-Director of the Integrated Graduate School, and member of several academic committees. Active in promoting open access linguistics through the Language Sciences Press.