Newsletter May 2020

This is the 143rd 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 2020 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in April 2020.

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in May

• Ryan Bochnak will give a virtual talk in the Linguistics Forschungskolloquium at the University of Stuttgart on May 12th. The title of the talk is Towards a semantics of graded futures in Washo.
   
• Speech Prosody is taking place from 24th-28th May 2020 (Tokyo, Japan, virtual conference). Bettina Braun, Marieke Einfeldt, Gloria Esposito & Nicole Dehé are giving a talk (presented by Marieke Einfeldt) on The prosodic realization of rhetorical and information-seeking questions in German spontaneous speech. Katharina Zahner, Manluolan Xu, Yiya Chen, Nicole Dehé & Bettina Braun are giving a talk (presented by Katharina Zahner) on The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese.

in April

• Georg A. Kaiser gave an invited talk on Variation syntaxique dans les interrogatives partielles des langues romanes at the Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique at the Université de Genève on April 28th.

More News

• On March 5th, Andreas Trotzke has been elected as Advisory Board Member for the DGfS (German Linguistic Society) and as DGfS Representative of "Lehramtsinitiative" (Initiative for Linguistics in Language Education).
   
• Two new projects with George Walkden as PI started in April 2020. The first, Germanic dispersion beyond trees and waves, is funded by the DFG for three years and aims to shed new light on the early history and interrelationships of the Germanic languages. The project's doctoral researcher is Frederik Hartmann. The second project, Linguistic forecasting, is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation programme “Original - isn't it?” For one year, and allows George to take research leave to investigate the controversial topic of predicting language change.
   
• We call your attention to several press publications reported about the research of the BabySpeechLab:

1. The University published a press release about the Babylab's participation in the ManyBabies project, an international research cooperation of 67 Babylabs. In a large-scale study, it was confirmed that Babies prefer infant-directed over adult directed speech, even if they hear infant-directed speech in a foreign language. Link to the press release. These news were also published in the Südkurier on March 23rd and 24th.
2. Bettina Braun and Katharina Zahner gave an interview to the Süddeutsche Zeitung which published an article on infant-directed speech on March 3rd.
3. Katharina Zahner gave an interview to SWR3 about infant-directed speech which was broadcast in the SWR3 Morning Show on February 6th.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Braun, Bettina, Marieke Einfeldt, Gloria Esposito & Nicole Dehé. The prosodic realization of rhetorical and information-seeking questions in German spontaneous speech. Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 10th International Conference (2020), 24th-28th May 2020, Tokyo, Japan.
   
• Zahner, Katharina, Manluolan Xu, Yiya Chen, Nicole Dehé, & Bettina Braun. The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese. Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 10th International Conference (2020), 24th-28th May 2020, Tokyo, Japan.
   
• Walkden, George, & Hannah Booth. 2020. Reassessing the historical evidence for embedded V2. In Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe (eds.), “Rethinking verb second”, 536-554. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
   
• Natasha Korotkova's paper Evidential meaning and (not-)at-issueness has been accepted to “Semantics & Pragmatics”.
   
• Bayer, Josef & Constantin Freitag. 2020. How much verb moves to second position? In: Horst Lohnstein & Antonios Tsiknakis (eds.), “Verb Second – Grammar internal and grammar external interfaces”. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter [series: Interface Explorations]. 77-122.

Bild Copyright Angelika Wolter/pixelio.de