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Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz

Issue CLII: February 2021

This is the 152nd 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 2021 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in January 2021.

Leaving Konstanz

Congratulations to Katharina Zahner who will take up an assistant professorship (Juniorprofessur) in Phonetics at the University of Trier.

Events at/by the Department

The Lecture series The Multilingual Mind: lecture series on multilingualism across disciplines started on 3rd November 2020 and will run this year online via Zoom on Tuesday from 17.00-18.30. The speakers will present research findings on multilingualism across different disciplines, in line with the MultiMind project (linguistics, education, psychology, neuroscience, speech & language pathology). The lecture series is aimed at everyone interessted in Multilingualism. The dates, list of presentations, and Zoom link can be found here.

Department and Research Colloquium in February

4.2 Charles Yang Discovery Procedure and the Scope of Linguistic Explanation

Department and Research Colloquium in January

14.01 Antje Schweitzer (Universität Stuttgart) Establishing phonological categories based on phonetic parameter distributions
21.01

Projekt P10 Comprehension of rhetorical questions in early and late bilingual language acquisition

Projekt P6 Current research topic in P6: At the prosody-syntax and phonetics-phonology interface

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in February

  • Regine Eckardt will present at the Biased Questions Workshop, to be held at the Leibniz-ZAS Berlin on February 4th and 5th, 2021. The program can be found  here.
    The talk Pedagogical Questions in Old English: The case of Boethius presents joint work by Regine Eckardt and George Walkden.
     
  • Anja Arnhold, Bettina Braun & Maribel Romero will give a talk at the workshop "Biased Questions: Experimental Results & Theoretical Modelling” on Feb, 4th-5th. Their talk is on Bias in English and German negative polar questions.
     
  • Laura González López and Andreas Trotzke will give a talk on ¡Mira! La interfaz gramático-informativa en la periferia izquierda española at the Center for Theoretical Linguistics (CLT) Barcelona on February 17th.
     
  • Eva Wittenberg and Andreas Trotzke gave a talk on Using experimental dialect data to study conceptual composition in diminutive phrases at HU Berlin on January 21st.
     
  • Tanja Kupisch is invited speaker at the RUEG Conference - Dynamics of Language Contact, New Perspectives on Emerging Grammars, Variation and Change in Berlin (February 21st to 23rd, 2021).
     
  • Also George Walkden will be at the RUEG Conference - Dynamics of Language Contact, New Perspectives on Emerging Grammars, Variation and Change in Berlin and will be presenting on Tuesday 23rd February. His talk, with Kari Kinn (Bergen), is on Investigating Historical Heritage Languages: Possessives in Norn. You can find the program here.
     
  • Andreas Trotzke and Adriana Hanulíková will organize a workshop on Sprache & Kognition: Aktuelle Forschung für die Sprachdidaktik/DGfS-Lehramtsinitiative at the DGfS 2021 conference (U Freiburg) on February 23rd. One of the speakers is our dear colleague Theo Marinis, and there is no participation fee. More information can be found here.
     
  • Svenja Schmid and Georg A. Kaiser will present a poster On word order variation and information structure in Spanish and Italian ‘why’-interrogatives at the 46th Incontro di Grammatica Generativa (IGG46) which is taking place online/at the University of Siena, February 23th-26th.

in January

  • Anna Czypionka gave an invited talk: Assessing linguistic illusions at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. January 8th 2021, expert talk for MA and Ph. students, University of Wroclaw (Poland).
     
  • Cory Bill (now at ZAS) and Todor Koev presented their ongoing work on VERUM, polarity focus, and question bias at two venues in early 2021. Their paper at the Linguistic Society of America 2021 is called Verum Focus IS Verum, but not Always Focus and their talk at the German Linguistics Society 43 is called High Negation Questions are Always Polarity Focused and Sometimes Contain Verum.
     
  • On January 20th and 21st, the Hebrew University at Jerusalem hosted the international online conference “Language Change: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives”. On Thursday, January 21st, Regine Eckardt presented a flash talk: The perfect winner: On the historical pragmatics of preterite loss in Southern German varieties.
     
  • Josef Bayer was the moderator in the Linguistic Flashmob (ZOOM conference’) on 21st January 2021. There was a debate about the topic Case between Julie Legate and Mark Baker.

More News

  • We are very glad to announce that Prof. Maribel Romero, together with Prof. Wataru Uegaki (co-PI, Univ. Edinburgh) and Dr. Floris Roelofsen (co-I, Univ. Amsterdam) has been awarded a project titled A cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions on clausal embedding, jointly founded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
     
  • Congratulations to Alexandra Rehn who receives funding by the Young Scholar Fund for the preparation, evaluation and visualisation of Alemannic data, focussing on possessive constructions.
     
  • Annette Hautli-Janisz is PI in a new project, Deliberation Laboratory (DeLab), funded in the AI and the Society of the Future call by the VolkswagenStiftung, from 04/2021 for four years. The project aims to develop a transformative online experimentation environment that will allow us to explore the nature, causes, and consequences of citizens’ perceptions in public, online dialogue across languages. Involved sites are the University of Goettingen (PolSci), the University of Dundee (CompSci), the Warsaw University of Technology (Philosophy) and the University of Amsterdam (PolSci).

    In a Memorandum of Understanding, Annette Hautli-Janisz has started a cooperation with Roberta Facchinetti, Silvia Cavalieri and Sara Corrizzato from the University of Verona, Italy, on understanding the role of questions in political interviews. Verona will mostly be involved in the syntactic and semantic annotation of the data, the Konstanz site pairs up with Biljana Scott in understanding and coding speaker intention.
     
  • Miriam Butt and Daniel Keim have been granted a second phase by the DFG for work within the Priority Programm RATIO (SPP Robust Argumentation Machines). The new project is called "CUEPAQ: Visual Analytics and Linguistics for Capturing, Understanding, and Explaining Personalized Argument Quality” and will run for 3 years. The researchers involved in the project are Fabian Sperrle (Computer Science) and Mark-Matthias Zymla (Linguistics), with Menna El-Assady (Computer Science) closely involved in guiding the project work.
     
  • Alexander Pfaff and Alexandra Rehn are organizing the workshop Adjective: The unkown category at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) in Athens, 31st August - 3rd September 2021.
     
  • We are delighted to announce that Kajsa Djärv has been awarded a 2-year Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, to be hosted by Prof. Maribel Romero at the University of Konstanz. During the fellowship, which will investigate the meaning and complementation patterns of factive predicates, Kajsa will continue to work closely with Prof. Romero and colleagues in the Linguistics Department.
     
  • Ramona Baumgartner is an invited speaker in a series of  Online-Workshops about supportive measures for literacy development in early childhood and primary school for educators, teachers and parents. This training was jointly organised by the Zentrum für Mehrsprachigkeit and the Volkshochschule Landkreis Konstanz e.V., Grundbildungszentrum in cooperation with the Amt für Migration und Integration Landkreis Konstanz, Bildungsbüro Amt für Bildung und Sport Stadt Konstanz, Bildungsmanagement Fachbereich Jugend, Bildung and Sport Stadt Radolfzell and the Universität Konstanz. Original title: Familiy Literacy in der Grundbildung: Ein Workshop zur Förderung der Lese- und Schreibfähigkeiten von Kindergarten- und Grundschulkindern und möglicher Unterstützungsangebote für Eltern.
    Next workshops in the series:
    Thursday, 4th February 2021, 6-7.45 pm, https://www.vhs-landkreis-konstanz.de/9/kurs/GBZ_Workshop-fuer-Fachkraefte_KitasGSElternbeiraete/211-67710#inhalt
    Thursday, 25th February 2021, 6-7.45 pm, https://www.vhs-landkreis-konstanz.de/9/kurs/GBZ_Workshop-fuer-Fachkraefte_KitasGSElternbeiraete/211-67713#inhalt
     
  • Nicole Dehé and Christiane Ulbrich have been granted a DFG project on Cross-linguistic influence in phonology: the case of heritage Icelandic. They study selected phonological phenomena (preaspiration, word stress) in several groups of heritage language speakers and L2 speakers of Icelandic to throw light on the questions whether phenomena at different phonological levels are affected in the same way by dynamic cross-linguistic influences and whether these effects are the same for different types of learners.

Publications by Members of the Department

  • Westergaard, M. & T. Kupisch. 2021. Stable and vulnerable domains in Germanic Heritage Languages. In Kristin Hagen, Arnstein Hjelde, Karine Stjernholm & Øystein A. Vangsnes (eds), Bauta: Janne B. Johannesen in Memoriam, 503-527 [Oslo Studies in Language 11(2)]
     
  • Kupisch, T., S. Pereira Soares, E. Puig Mayenco & J. Rothman. 2021. Multilingualism and Chomsky’s Generative Grammar In Edited by Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey. Blackwell Companion to Chomsky. JohnWiley & Sons, Inc, 232-242.
     
  • Kupisch, T. 2021 Heritage Languages in Europe. In S. Montrul & M. Polinsky (eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, 45-68.
     
  • Kupisch, T., Mitrofanova, N. & M. Westergaard. forthcoming. The role of phonological vs. semantic gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German-Russian) Journal of Child Language.
     
  • Bögel, Tina and Lea Rach. 2020. Swabian ed and edda: Negation at the interfaces. In “Proceedings of the LFG20 conference, online conference”. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
     
  • Andreas Trotzke & Laia Mayol. 2021. Catalan focus markers as discourse particles. Journal of Linguistics. First View.
     
  • Árnason, Kristján, Anja Arnhold, Ailbhe Ní Chasaide, Nicole Dehé, Amelie Dorn & Osahito Miyaoka. 2020. Prosodic systems, Chapter 19: The North Atlantic and the Arctic. In: The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody, ed. by Carlos Gussenhoven and Aoju Chen, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     
  • Beck, Christin & Miriam Butt. 2020. Visual analytics for historical linguistics: opportunities and challenges. Journal of Data Minging and Digital Humanities. Special issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics, Episciences.org, pages 1-23.
     
  • Question-sensitive discourse particles at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics - an experimental approach. Anna Czypionka, Maribel Romero, Josef Bayer, accepted for publication in "Glossa".

Acquisitions of the Library

  • Xiao, Mengyuan: Topic in Mandarin Chinese
  • Zhang, Fangming: L2 acquisition of resultative compound constructions by German learners of Mandarin
  • Heidmann, Ute: L’actif relationnel des langues, littératures et cultures ¬Das¬ Relationspotential von Sprachen, Literaturen und Kulturen
  • Sedivy, Julie: Language in mind: an introduction to psycholinguistics
  • Külpmann, Robert: Variation in der Argumentstruktur des Deutschen
  • Bachmann, Armin R.: Atlas der deutschen Mundarten in Tschechien; Band 1 . Einführung
  • Alt, Peter-André: Aufklärung: Lehrbuch Germanistik
  • Lenz, Alexandra N.: Germanistische Dialektlexikographie zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts
  • Nübling, Damaris: Historische Sprachwissenschaft des Deutschen: eine Einführung in die Prinzipien des Sprachwandels
  • Moraldo, Sandro M.: Korrektivsätze: Studien zur Verbzweitstellung nach obwohl im Deutschen
  • Andreas-Salomé, Lou: Russische Texte: aus der Zeitschrift Sewerny Westnik
  • Hardt, Isabelle: Sudetendeutsches Wörterbuch ; Band 6 . K - Karbid-kessel
  • Pustka, Elissa: Phonetik und Phonologie des Spanischen: eine korpuslinguistische Einführung
  • Wehr, Hans: Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart: arabisch - deutsch
  • Internationale Gesellschaft für Dialektologie des Deutschen / Kongress <6., 2018, Marburg>: Regiolekt - Der neue Dialekt? Akten des 6. Kongresses der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Dialektologie des Deutschen (IGDD)
  • Linguistic inquiry; Volume 50 (2019)
  • Germanistik <Tübingen>; Band 60 (2019)
  • Jahrbuch des Vereins für Niederdeutsche Sprachforschung; 143 (Jahrgang 2020)
  • Iberoromania; número 92 (2020)
  • Italianistica; Anno 48 (2019)
  • Romanistisches Jahrbuch; Band 71 (2020)

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