Tobias Scheer - Biography#

Tobias Scheer is currently Directeur de Recherche at the CNRS in France. He works at the laboratory Bases, Corpus, Langage (UMR 7320) in Nice, of which he was the director from 2004 to 2011. Since 2013, he is the head of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société Sud-Est (MSHS-SE), which groups 9 labs for a total of about 400 researchers. In France, the Humanities are structured by a network of 22 Maisons des Sciences de l'Homme (RN-MSH), of which the MSHS-SE is the representative of the South-East.

Being a phonologist, Scheer's main interests lie in syllable structure, the interfaces of phonology (with morpho-syntax and phonetics) and the architecture of grammar in a cognitive science perspective thematically speaking, in the (Western) Slavic family as far as languages are concerned, and in diachronic study (Slavic, Romance, Germanic).

Related to the two books on the (history of the) interface with morpho-syntax that he has published in 2011 and 2012, he has developed an interest in Cognitive Science, which grounds his work in the sense that individual linguistic theories (of phonology or the interfaces) must comply with the standards of Cognitive Science and should be refereed by this means. Regarding phonology, Scheer is committed to Government Phonology (GP) and hence to the idea that representations contribute an independent and unoutrankable arbitral award: a linguistic object may be well- or ill-formed in absence of any comparison with other objects. In 2004, he has published what is today the standard reference for the modern version of GP, CVCV (or strict CV) theory.