Stefan Müller

Timeline

1. 1989–1993

   Studies in Berlin and Edinburgh

   Born in Jena in 1968, he studies computer science, computational linguistics and linguistics at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Edinburgh from 1989 to 1993. He earns his degree in computer science.

2. 1994–1997

   An HPSG grammar in Prolog

   From 1994 to 1996 he researches and teaches at the chair for computational linguistics at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he develops an HPSG fragment of German and implements a Prolog system to process it. In 1997 he defends his dissertation, Spezifikation und Verarbeitung deutscher Syntax in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, at the Technische Fakultät of Saarland University.

3. 1997–2001

   Verbmobil and a habilitation

   From 1997 to 2000 he works as a grammar developer at the Language Technology Lab of the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken, on the project Verbmobil. In 2000 he moves to the Berlin company Interprice as head of grammar development for English and Spanish. In 2001 he completes his habilitation in computational linguistics at Saarland University with the study Complex Predicates: Verbal Complexes, Resultative Constructions, and Particle Verbs in German.

4. 2003–2007

   Junior professor in Bremen

   In April 2003 he becomes Juniorprofessor for theoretical and computational linguistics at the University of Bremen, where he works with and develops the TRALE system and builds the German grammar B-Ger-Gram. From 2005 to 2006 he also serves as acting chair of theoretical computational linguistics at the University of Potsdam. By 2007 his German, Chinese and Maltese grammars use the same core.

5. 2007–2016

   Professor at Freie Universität Berlin

   In 2007 he becomes professor for German grammar at the Institute for German and Dutch Philology of the Freie Universität Berlin, a post he holds until 2016. His CoreGram project, described in a 2015 article in the Journal of Language Modelling, keeps implemented grammars of German, Danish, Persian, Maltese and Mandarin Chinese on a shared core.

6. 2014

   Co-founding Language Science Press

   Together with Martin Haspelmath he founds the diamond open access publisher Language Science Press in 2014; the project grows out of the Open Access in Linguistics initiative that he starts with colleagues at the Freie Universität Berlin in August 2012. Academia Europaea elects him to its Linguistic Studies section in 2014.

7. 2016–2024

   Professor at Humboldt University

   In April 2016 he becomes professor of German linguistics with a focus on syntax at the Institute for German Language and Linguistics of Humboldt University, where he heads the German Grammar group. In 2023 he publishes Germanic Syntax: A Constraint-Based View with Language Science Press, and the fifth revised edition of his textbook Grammatical Theory appears. In 2024 the second revised edition of the HPSG Handbook, which he edits with Anne Abeillé, Robert D. Borsley and Jean-Pierre Koenig, comes out.

8. As of October 2026

   An HPSG account of register

   He is a professor at the Institute for German Language and Linguistics of Humboldt University and works in project A04 of CRC 1412, Building register into the architecture of language – an HPSG account. A 2026 article with Yanru Lu on deliminative verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese appears in the Journal of Linguistics.