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Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXL: February 2020

This is the 140th 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 February 2020 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in January 2020.

Events at/by the Department

in February

  • At the Ringvorlesung on 5th February Georg Kaiser will give a talk on Bilingualism matters - or not … – Bilingualism, monolingualism and language conflict at 17.00 in R 512. Everyone is welcome.

in January

  • At the Ringvorlesung on 7th January Dr. Christos Pliatsikas (University of Reading) presented The effects of bilingualism on brain structure.
     
  • There was also an invited talk by Dr. habil Dagmar Bittner (Leibniz ZAS Berlin) about The use of Pronouns in people with Dementia. This talk was part of the colloquium of Theo Marinis on Thursday 9th.
     
  • Olga Kellert gave a talk entitled Syntactic and Prosodic properties of interrogatives in Italian on January 23th at the "Multilingualism research colloquium".
     
  •  On January 30th took place a talk given by Mark-Matthias Zymla on Formal pragmatics for the study of argumentation in deliberative debates.
     

    Department and Research Colloquium in February

    13.02

    PhD Candidates Talk

    Katharina Kaiser Word order alternations in French and Brazilian Portuguese wh-in-situ interrogatives - an experimental study

    Carmen Widera 'ele' in impersonal constructions in contemporary European Portuguese – expletive subject or discourse element?

    Department and Research Colloquium in January

    09.01 Laurence Labrune (Université Bordeaux Montaigne & CNRS UMR5263 CLLE ERSSàB) Word initial rhotic avoidance: a typological survey
    16.01

    Joanna Błaszczak (Uniwersytet Wroclawski) Clause structure, case and agreement in Polish existential, possessive and locative sentences: A phase-based account
    30.01

    Johannes Heim (Universität Greifswald) Deconstructing (non-)canonical questions in English: A cross-modular approach

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in February

  • George Walkden will be giving a talk on Complexity as L2-difficulty: sociohistorically responsive features in syntactic change at the QMUL Departmental Research Seminar on February 5th and at the Geneva Research Seminar on February 18th.
     
  • On February 6th, Saira Bano will present a joint work with Miriam Butt on The Vowel System of Hazaragi: Evidence from the Verbal Prefixes at the 17th Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP17) at the University of Warsaw.
     
  • Petr Biskup will give an invited talk Zum Wandel modifizierender Präfixe im Slavischen at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel on February 7th.
     
  • Anna Czypionka will be at the Linguistic Evidence Conference 2020 at the University of Tübingen, February 13th-15th, for a Talk on Licensing Question-Sensitive Discourse Particles: Evidence from Grammaticality Judgments, Self-Paced Reading and EEG studies a joint work with Mariya Kharaman, Josef Bayer, Maribel Romero & Carsten Eulitz.
     
  • On February 14th, Regine Eckardt will present at Linguistic Evidence 2020, Tübingen. The talk is on The perfect expression. Why the preterite got lost in Southern Germany.
     
  • Miriam Butt will give an invited keynote talk on Linguistics Data Visualization and a workshop on Studying Language Change in the South Asian Context at the 7th International Conference on Language and Technology, 19th - 21st February, 2020 at UET, Lahore, Pakistan.
     
  • Bettina Braun is giving an invited talk at the Workshop Focus alternatives: Theoretical and empirical perspective in Berlin on February 27th.
     
  • Erlinde Meertens and Izabela Jordanoska will give a talk titled Focus marking strategies in polar questions in Macedonian at the workshop Focus alternatives: Theoretical and Empirical Perspective in Berlin, February 27th-28th.
     
  • Laura Dörre and Andreas Trotzke will give a presentation on Inclusive 'only' in German at the workshop Focus Alternatives: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (Humboldt University Berlin, February 27th-28th)

in January

More News

  • Congratulations to Katharina Zahner who was one of the winners of the Zukunftskolleg’s mentorships and is now an associated fellow at the Zukunftskolleg. Together with her proposed mentor, Prof. Anne Cutler (MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney), she will be working on a project entitled Towards promoting awareness for the teaching and learning of prosody in a foreign language. Prof. Cutler will be visiting her mentee for one week in June 2020. At the end of the visit, there will be a related workshop TiPToP: Trends in pedagogical transmission of prosody on June 24th-25th.
     
  • We would like to announce a workshop on Trends in pedagogical transmission of prosody (TiPToP) to be held on June 24th-25th, University of Konstanz, Germany.

    TiPToP attempts to bridge the gap between prosodic research and research on teaching practices by bringing together researchers working on cross-linguistic aspects of prosody, on prosody in L2 acquisition, and the teaching of prosody.

    The workshop is organised by Katharina Zahner (University of Konstanz, Questions at the Interfaces, SpeechNet Bawü), Marieke Einfeldt (University of Konstanz, Questions at the Interfaces), Nadja Schauffler (University of Stuttgart, SpeechNet Bawü) and Thanh Lan Truong (University of Tübingen, SpeechNet Bawü).

    TiPToP is funded by a mentorship program of the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz and the Research Unit Questions at the Interface at the University of Konstanz. The workshop is a SpeechNet BaWü event.
    Everybody in the department is welcome!
     
  • The proposed workshop with the title Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (program committee: Lasha Abzianidze, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Thomas Icard, Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Larry Mos and Hitomi Yanaka) was accepted at NASSLLI 2020, taking place at the Brandeis University (MA-US) from July 12th to July 17th. The workshop will feature talks by invited speakers and other presentation sessions. There will soon be a call for contributions. Stay tuned!

Publications by Members of the Department

  • Dehé, Nicole & Bettina Braun. 2020. The intonation of information seeking and rhetorical questions in Icelandic. “Journal of Germanic Linguistics” 32(1): 1-42.
     
  • Dehé, Nicole. 2019. 'Minimal adaptation' and the edges of prosodic domains. "Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism" 9(6): 833-837.
     
  • Sarveswaran, Kengatharaiyer and Miriam Butt. 2019. Computational Challenges with Tamil Complex Predicates. In Miriam Butt, Tracy Holloway King and Ida Toivo- nen (eds.) "Proceedings of the LFG’19 Conference, Australian National University", 272–292. CSLI Publications.
     
  • Bano, Saira, Miriam Butt and Ashwini Deo. 2019. Achievement Predicates and Tense Paradigms in Hazaragi. In Miriam Butt, Tracy Holloway King and Ida Toivonen (eds.) "Proceedings of the LFG’19 Conference, Australian National University", 394–414. CSLI Pub- lications.
     
  • Cognola, Federica, & George Walkden. 2019. Pro-drop in interrogatives and declaratives: a parallel study of Old High German and Old Italian. “Linguistik Online“ 100(7), 95-140.
     
  • Walkden, George, & Anne Breitbarth. 2019. Complexity as L2-difficulty: implications for syntactic change. “Theoretical Linguistics” 45(3-4), 183-209.
     
  • Walkden, George, & Anne Breitbarth. 2019. Interpreting (un)interpretability (response to commentaries). “Theoretical Linguistics” 45(3-4), 309-317.

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