Photo copyright Tania Simeoni

Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXCI: May 2024

This is the 191st issue of the Newsletter published by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. It covers informations about the plans of the members of the department in May 2024 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in April 2024.

Visiting Konstanz

Tommi Buder-Gröndahl (University of Helsinki) is a visiting researcher
in our department until the end of May.

Events at/by the Department

Department and Research Colloquium in May

02.05 Raphael Berthele (Universität Fribourg): On predispositions for language learning: Multi-variable explorations of children and adults
16.05 Pat Strycharczuk (University of Manchester): Reconciling spatial and dynamic aspects of vowel variation and change
23.05 Joel Wallenberg (University of York): Syntactic planning, informational risk, and the information threshold

Department and Research Colloquium in April

18.04 Eniko Ladanyi (Universität Potsdam): The relationship of grammar development with musical rhythm abilities in children
25.04 Tommi Buder-Gröndahl (University of Helsinki): Linguistic representations in large language models: Some foundational problems

in April

Regine Eckardt organized an event for the 1300th anniversary of the Island Reichenau in cooperation with the department of Philosophy and the department of Literature-Art-Media. There were various presentations and interactive contributions, suitable for children aged 10 and over. The event Reisen in Raum und Zeit - das Leben auf der Reichenau im Spiegel alter Manuskripte took place on April 27th in the Museum Reichenau.

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In Mai

  • George Walkden is giving a talk on Adult language acquisition and syntactic change in the ComSyn lecture series at the University of Leiden on Thursday 2nd May.
     
  • Sergio Zanotto, Qi Yu, Miriam Butt and Diego Frassinelli will present a paper GRIT: A Dataset of Group Reference Recognition in Italian at The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation LREC-COLING 2024, May 20th-25th, Turin, Italy
     
  • On May 25,th Qi Yu, Naomi Reichmann, Regine Eckardt and Miriam Butt will present a paper Ad Hoc Compounds for Stance Detection at The Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD 2024) collocated with LREC-COLING 2024, Turin, Italy. This is a joint work with colleagues at the University of Tübingen: Dr. Fabian Schlotterbeck, Hening Wang, and Prof. Dr. Britta Stolterfoht.
     
  • On May 22nd, Gemma McCarley will give an invited talk titled The effects of orality on subject pronoun expression in a Spanish corpus in the linguistic colloquium of the Institute for Romance Philology at the Freie Universität Berlin.
     
  • Angelika Golegos, Anna Czypionka, and Theo Marinis will present a poster entitled Pronoun resolution in adult L2 learners of German by speakers of null- and overt-subject languages: Cross-linguistic influence or a learning mechanism? at the conference ISBPAC, Swansea University, Swansea, 22nd-24th May.
     
  • Maribel Romero will present a paper at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 34 on Mood across constructions: A unified approach, to be held at the University of Rochester on May 28th-30th, 2024.

In April

  • On April 11th, Regine Eckardt presented at the Amsterdam Workshop on “Polar question meaning(s) across languages”, organized by Beste Kamali (University of Amsterdam). The title of her talk was Are you crazy?” — On Controversial Rhetorical Questions. You can find more information here.
     
  • Chiara Riegger and George Walkden gave a talk on The prosody of the prefix ge- in (Early) West Germanic at the Forum for Germanic Language Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK (presenting joint work with Tina Bögel).
     
  • Maryam Mohammadi presented at the 42nd WCCFL conference at Berkeley University, (12th -14th April) a paper on Speaker Attitudes Predict Epistemic Biases in Polar Questions: Evidence from Farsi, her paper is a collaboration work with Todor Koev.
     
  • Maribel Romero has been invited as the 2024 speaker of the Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture series at Harvard University. Her lecture was titled On Conservativity and other Crosslinguistic Semantic Generalizations.
     
  • Deniz Özyıldız is giving two talks on mental states and events, one at the Newcastle Linguistics Seminar Series on April 26th, and the other at the Complement Clauses Côte d’Azur speaker series on May 6th.

More News

The program for the MECORE closing workshop (June 19th–21st) is out. Everybody is welcome to attend, but please register on the website.

The German Linguistic Society (DGfS) has now started a YouTube channel, and Andreas Trotzke is kicking off this channel with an intro to DGfS's Lehramtsinitiative.

Publications by Members of the Department

  • Walkden, George. 2024. Parataxis and hypotaxis in the history of English. In Thijs Porck, Moragh S. Gordon and Luisella Caon (eds.), Keys to the history of English: diachronic linguistic change, morpho-syntax and lexicography, 10-33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (online access)
     
  • Tamara Rathcke’s team published a paper in the “Journal of Acoustical Society of America”. Tamara Rathcke, Eline Smit, Chia-Yuan Lin, Haruo Kubozono. Testing an acoustic model of the P-center in English and Japanese. The article is available open access from the journal website.
     
  • Trotzke, Andreas (ed.). 2024. Recent Advances in the Syntax of Speech Acts. Special Issue of Journal of Pragmatics.
     
  • Antje Strauss (Uni Konstanz) published together with Lars Meyer (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science) a collected volume featuring 7 book parts and 47 chapters on Rhythms of Speech and Language including two in-house authors:
     - Braun, Bettina (In press). Linguistic factors affecting amplitude modulation spectra. In: L. Meyer & A. Strauss (eds), Rhythms of Speech and Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
    - Rathcke, Tamara (In press). The P-center effect and the domain of beat perception in speech. In: L. Meyer & A. Strauss (eds), Rhythms of Speech and Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
     
  • Walkden, George. 2023. Forty years of diachronic generative syntax. (Contribution to Diachrony and Diachronica: 40@40.) Diachronica 40(5), 667-669.
     
  • Hartmann, Frederik, & George Walkden. 2024. The strength of the phylogenetic signal in syntactic data. “Glossa: a journal of general linguistics” 9(1), 125. (online access)
     
  • Pfaff, Alexander, & George Walkden. 2024. Adjectival articles in early Germanic. In Kristin Bech & Alexander Pfaff (eds.), “Noun phrases in early Germanic languages”, 323-364. Open Germanic Linguistics 8. Berlin: Language Science Press. (online access)
     
  • Bech, Kristin, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova & George Walkden. 2024. Noun phrase modifiers in early Germanic: a comparative corpus study of Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. In Kristin Bech & Alexander Pfaff (eds.), “Noun phrases in early Germanic languages”, 71-109. Open Germanic Linguistics 8. Berlin: Language Science Press. (online access)
     
  • Rehn, Alexandra, Alexander Pfaff & Svetlana Petrova. 2024. The AP-Domain in Germanic. "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics". Oxford University Press. (online access)

Acquisitions of the Library

  • Ziegeler, Debra: The Influence of the Lexifier: Beyond Grammaticalization in Singapore English
  • Sultan, Sara: Interpreting complex words
  • Lin, Hsun-Hui: Lexical influence on machine-generated sarcasm: an exploratory study with ChatGPT
  • Arona, Sebastiano Pio: Negativ-polare Elemente im Italienischen: eine Studie zum Sprachbewusstsein bei Herkunftssprechern süditalienischer Varietäten
  • Schmid, Monika S.: The Oxford handbook of language attrition
  • Barth, Danielle: Understanding corpus linguistics
  • Andres, Carina: Das Verhältnis von Konjunktiv I und "sollen" zur Redewiedergabe in den schweizerdeutschen Dialekten: eine empirische Arbeit
  • Schmid, Hans Ulrich: Grundzüge einer deskriptiven Syntax
  • Braune, Wilhelm: Phonologie und Morphologie
  • Tomasin, Lorenzo: Il caos e l'ordine: le lingue romanze nella storia della cultura europea
  • Barth, Danielle: Understanding corpus linguistics
  • Grimm, Lara Carina: Zur Vermittlung von französischen Hervorhebungsstrategien im gesteuerten Zweitspracherwerb
  • Bergunter, Stefanie: Spracherhalt und Sprachwechsel im Russischen bei russisch-deutschen bilingualen Jugendlichen
  • Linguistische Berichte; Heft 273-276 (2023)
  • Studi italiani di linguistica teorica e applicata/Università degli Studi di Bologna, Centro Interfacoltà di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata; Anno 51 (2022)
  • Studies in philology/University of North Carolina; Volume 120 (2023)
  • Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik/in Verbindung mit der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik: Jahrgang 55, Heft 2
  • Amerikastudien; 26.1981
  • Italienisch; 45. Jahrgang, 1 (2023) = 89

Photo copyright Tania Simeoni