Newsletter Oktober 2023

This is the 184th 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 October 2023 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in September 2023.

New to Konstanz

This month Marc Meisezahl joins George Walkden’s research project on non-finite complementation in the history of English. Welcome back to Konstanz, Marc!

We welcome also Chiara Riegger, who after completing her MA with flying colours has joined the department’s staff as a graduate researcher in the historical phonology of the Germanic languages, supervised by Tina Bögel and George Walkden.

Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran (aka Sarves) joins us this semester from the University of Jaffna via a Herz Fellowship from the Zukunftskolleg. In addition to pursuing his research on Tamil syntax and computational linguistics here, he is teaching a course together with Tafseer Ahmed on Challenges for NLP from South Asian Languages.

Events at/by the Department

Department and Research Colloquium in October

In October

20.10 Die spinnen, die Römer! Wie Asterix und Obelix die deutsche Sprache eroberten ... (at Hedicke's Terracotta, Konstanz)

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In October

• The 37th South Asian Language Analysis Roundtable (SALA-37) conference took place in Venice from October 4th-7th, featuring three Konstanz talks:
  
  Benazir Mumtaz and Miriam Butt
  The prosody of alternative vs. polar questions in Urdu
  
  Miriam Butt and Aditi Lahiri
  Pertinacity and Light Verbs Revisited
  
  Tafseer Ahmed, Miriam Butt, and Lucrezia Carnesale
  Experiencers vs. Agents in Urdu/Hindi Nominalized Verbs of Perception
   
• Anna Huggenberg, Bettina Braun and Marieke presented their poster entitled Realisation of stops in Zurich German and Swiss Standard German at Phonetik & Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum (P&P) 2023 which was be held from Friday 6th to Saturday 7th October 2023 in Bern, Switzerland.
   
• On October 8th, Regine Eckardt will present at the Workshop “Suspense”, organized by Edgar Onea and Tilmann Köppe at the Karl-Franzens University Graz. Her talk will be on Hot news. How QuDs create suspense and closure in newspaper texts.
   
• Tanja Kupisch will give a keynote speech at the International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education (ICMME) at the University of Malta from 12th to 13th October 2023.
   
• On October 20th, Josef Bayer and Patricia Cabredo Hofherr are organizing in Paris a Workshop in honor of Hans-Georg Obenauer, who passed away in November 2019. Information about the venue and the program can be found under this link.
   
• The research group Complexity in Derivational Morphology: Theory and Theoretical Evidence will present two posters at the SNL 2023 conference in Marseille, France, 24th-26th October 2023. The programme of the conference is available here.
  
  Poster 1 (A36, October 24, 2023).
  Anna Gupta, Charles Redmon, Frans Plank, Aditi Lahiri, Carsten Eulitz. The role of morpho-phonological complexity in word recognition: an ERP study of German nouns.
  
  Poster 2 (A32, October 24, 2023).
  Charles Redmon, Anna Gupta, Aditi Lahiri, Frans Plank, Carsten Eulitz. Neural signatures of conversion and stress alternation in English noun-verb recognition.

In September

• The research group Complexity in Derivational Morphology: Theory and Theoretical Evidence presented two posters at the  AMLaP 23 conference in Donostia–San Sebastián, Spain, from August 31st to September 2nd, 2023. The programme of the conference can be found here.
  * Gupta, A., Redmon, C., Plank, F., Lahiri, A. & Eulitz, C. Complexity in affixation and word length in German word recognition: An ERP study.
  The study investigated the processing and decomposition of complex words in German.
  * Redmon, C., Gupta, A., Eulitz, C., Plank, F. & Lahiri, A. Morpho-phonological complexity and lexical access: An ERP study of English adjectives.
  The research was devoted to studying complex words in English.
   
• Several Konstanz linguists presented at ICHL 26 in Heidelberg, 4th-8th September:
  * Sigríður Björnsdóttir, Lisa Gotthard, Chiara Riegger and George Walkden gave a talk on The rise of raising in Early Modern English.
  * Henri Kauhanen, with international colleagues Deepthi Gopal, Christopher Kitching, Tobias Galla and Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, presented a talk called Correlations between linguistic features are reflected in their geospatial patterning: Introducing the geo-typological Sandwich Conjecture.
  * Gemma McCarley presented on Diachronic null subject use across Latin American Spanish: comparing corpora.
  * George Walkden was part of a panel discussion on linguistic models for understanding morphosyntactic change.
  * The conference also featured keynotes by former Konstanz professor Aditi Lahiri and honorary doctor in our department Paul Kiparsky.
   
• Maribel Romero and Maryam Mohammadi gave a talk in SuB 28, in Ruhr University (Bochum) 5th-8th September.
  The title is Polar Particles in Farsi: Anaphora in the Scoreboard Model of Discourse.
   
• Regine Eckardt presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 28 (Ruhr University Bochum) on September 6th. Her paper is on Rhetorical question marking: German schliesslich. For more details check here.
   
• To mark the centenary of Morris Halle’s birth, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Cambridge, MA hosted a conference, M@100 on September 8th–10th, 2023. Saira Bano presented a poster Morphophonological Alternation in the Hazaragi Prefixation’ in session two under distinctive features.
   
• Together with Oliver Watteler (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences), Ulrike Schneider gave a talk titled Can I publish my social media corpus? Legal considerations for data publication at the International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities in Mannheim, September 14th–15th.
   
• In his role as Speaker of DGfS's Lehramtsinitiative, Andreas Trotzke has been invited to deliver an opening address at DGfS's Sommerschule 2023 (University of Mainz, Sept. 18th-23rd, 2023).
   
• At the Romance Turn conference in Madrid (September 19th-21st), Anamaria Bentea gave two talks:
  * Romanian children’s real-time comprehension and production of which-questions with and without number mismatch (with Theo Marinis)
  * Effects of Person mismatch on the comprehension of clefts in French (with Ur Shlonksy and Stephanie Durrleman)
   
• Anamaria Bentea and Theo Marinis also presented at the RUEG conference 2023 in Berlin (September 26th-28th) on Syntactic Processing in Child Heritage Language Bilinguals.
   
• Georg A. Kaiser gave a talk titled La determinación de los sujetos nulos y la propiedad de sujeto nulo en las lenguas romances ('The determination of null subjects and the null subject property in Romance languages’) at the 38. Romanistentag in Leipzig from 24th to 27th September 2023.
   
• Svenja Schmid and Miriam Geiss gave a talk titled Zur Intonation in Entscheidungsfragen im Kontext von italienischen Herkunftssprechern at the 38. Romanistentag taking place in Leipzig from 24th to 27th September.

More News

• The Centre for Multilingualism participated with an information stand at the event Konstanz is(s)t international (23.09.23) at the Münsterplatz in Konstanz. Anna Czypionka, Muna Schönhuber and Simone Waitz met children and adults who came to the stand and gave information about language development and multilingualism. People took part in a wheel of fortune game that tested their knowledge about languages and multilingualism.
   
• George Walkden featured on the podcast A Language I Love Is… with Danny Bate, talking about Old Saxon. You can listen to the podcast or find out more here
   
• The General Assembly of the Deutschen Romanistikverband unanimously approved at its general meeting in Leipzig the proposal of Georg Kaiser und Anne Kraume that the next Romanistiktag take place in Constance from 22nd-24th.September 2025.

• Andreas Trotzke gave a radio interview on WDR5 about the German phrase 'Alles gut'. The interview can be found here.
   
•  Congratulations to Anna Czypionka who acquired YSF-funding for a new project Disentangling semantic and pragmatic processing in on-line sentence comprehension: Modal particles and their counterparts.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Walkden, George, Miriam Butt & Georg A. Kaiser (eds.). 2023. Proceedings of the 22nd Diachronic Generative syntax (DiGS) Conference. Special issue of Journal of Historical Syntax, 7(6-19). (online access)
   
• Schwarze, Christoph. 2022. L'arbitraire du signe : une illusion? Le symbolisme phonétique selon Georges Bohas testé sur l'allemand. "Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris". 117. fasc. 1. 1-28.
   
• Trotzke, Andreas. 2023. Pedagogical linguistics: Connecting formal linguistics to language teaching. "Language 99", e153-e175.
   
• Yasar, R., Bergmann, F., Lloyd-Smith, A,. Schmid, S.-P., Holzinger, K. & Kupisch, T. (2023). Experience of discrimination in egalitarian societies: the Sámi and majority populations in Sweden and Norway. "Ethnic and Racial Studies" (online access).
   
• Bentea, A., Shlonsky, U. & Durrleman S. (2023) Towards a hierarchy of featural mismatch effects in the acquisition of A’-dependencies: A comprehension study with French children. “Proceedings of the 47th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development” (pdf).

Acquisitions of the Library

• Khmara, Ekaterina: Language use and attitudes in Belarus
• Shao, Jingjing: Optimizing front-end processing for TTS of Mandarin Chinese dialects: an exploration of linguistic features

Photo copyright Radka Schöne/pixelio.de