Holger Diessel

Prof. Dr. Holger Diessel is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Jena, holding this position since 2004. He previously worked at the Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie in Leipzig (1998–2004), focusing on child language acquisition and comparative developmental psychology. His research explores the interplay between language use, syntax of complex sentences, and usage-based grammar theory’s cognitive foundations. He is an editorial board member for Cognitive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

Diessel earned his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo (1998) with a typological study on demonstratives. His Habilitation (performance-based study on complex sentence acquisition in preschoolers) solidified his expertise in developmental linguistics. His work emphasizes frequency effects in language acquisition, syntax-diachronics links, and cognitive mechanisms underlying grammatical systems.

During his 2011 FRIAS fellowship in Freiburg, he advanced a book project integrating usage-based theories across linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. Key themes include frequency, analogy, and processing time in language use and evolution. His publications span grammaticalization, clause structure typology, and child language development.