Newsletter June 2022

This is the 168th 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 June 2022 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in May 2022.

Events at/by the Department

In June

After more than three years, the MultiMind project is coming to an end. For this occasion, the MultiMind Final Conference will take place from 27th-29th June 2022 in a hybrid format in Konstanz, Germany.

The conference will consists of two parts, one for non-academic stakeholders on the 27th June and one for academic audiences on the 28th and 29th June. On the 1st day we will present the policy reports for speech and language therapists, psychiatrists, and teachers. On the 2nd and 3rd day, the 15 MultiMind early-stage researchers will present their most important results followed by a discussion on each day. The conference will be concluded with a round table on further directions on the 3rd day.

This is a free event, but registration is necessary to participate. For more information and to register please visit: www.multilingualmind.eu/final-conference

In May

On the occasion of the establishment of a lectorate for the Portuguese language at the Language Teaching Institute (SLI), a public festive event took place on May 5th, 2022, the World Day of the Portuguese Language, at 7 pm in room G 300. The event was themed 'Mother tongue - Second language - World language’ and the keynote speech was given by Cristina Flores from the Universidade do Minho in Braga on the topic Portuguese in the Diaspora. Acquisition and preservation of a family language. In parallel with this event, from May 2nd-8th, 2022, an exhibition was held in the foyer of the University Library on the work of José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who would have turned 100 this year. In addition, in May 2022, a film series Vozes. Movies in Portuguese Languages was shown at the Zebra Cinema, with movies from different countries of the Lusofone language area (subtitled in German).

Department and Research Colloquium in June

Department and Research Colloquium in May

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In June

• George Walkden will be presenting at the 23rd Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference at NYU (virtually), 8th-10th June, with a talk titled Sources for question particles.
   
• Julia Bacskai-Atkari will give a talk entitled Subject-object asymmetries and the development of relative clauses between Late Middle English and Early Modern English at the 42nd TABU Dag, Groningen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 9th-10th June 2022.

In May

• On May 3rd, Alexandra Rehn gave an invited talk on OCP effects in Germanic possession at the University of Stuttgart as part of the research colloquium.
   
• On May 11th, Natasha Korotkova gave an invited talk entitled Hearsay and (non-)commitment at the Semantics and Pragmatics Exchange speaker series at the University of Düsseldorf.
   
• Several members of the department presented talks at the workshop Non-canonical interrogatives across languages: prosody, semantics, pragmatics, in Tartu, Estonia, on May 12th and 13th in the framework of the Annual Conference of the Centre for Excellence in Estonian Studies Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Language and Culture
  
  * Bettina Braun, Nicole Dehé, Marieke Einfeld, Angela James, Ekaterina Kazak, Rita Sevastjanova, Daniela Wochner and Katharina Zahner-Ritter will present a talk titled What makes a question rhetorical? Evidence from a multiple-cue perception experiment
   

  * Bettina Braun and Sophie Kutscheid will present a talk entitled Perception of questions with a bouletic bias.
  
  * Ramona Wallner presented a talk titled Non-canonical inquiries in Spoken French.

• Svenja Schmid and Miriam Geiss presented a poster entitled Intonation of Polar Questions in German-dominant Heritage Speakers of Italian at Gasla 16 in Trondheim, 12th-14th May 2022.
   
• Miriam Geiss, Maria Ferin, Theo Marinis and Tanja Kupisch gave a talk on Rhetorical question comprehension in German-Italian bilingual children: comparing majority and minority language at Gasla 16 in Trondheim, 12th-14th May 2022.
   
•  Within the framework of the "Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft", May 14th, a poster and a talk provided the general public with information about the project Perceptions of Political Charisma in Low-Status Speakers with Tamara Rathcke, Diego Frassinelli and Judit Vári from Linguistics as well as Susumu Shikano, Stephan Streuber & Duangkamol Srismith.
  
  * Students of last semesters’ Bachelors course Language Disorders and Bilingualism presented a poster about Sign Languages.
  
  * Judit Vári took part in the Science Slam, with a talk titled  James Bond und das Moselfränkische.
   
• Grazia Di Pisa, Jason Rothman & Theo Marinis presented a talk entitled Gender and Number Agreement in Italian as a Heritage Language: A Self-Paced Reading Study at the Gasla 16 conference on Saturday 14th May in Trondheim.
   
• Anamaria Bentea and Theo Marinis gave a talk entitled Multiple wh-questions in Romanian Heritage Children - From Comprehension to Production on May 18th at the Heritage Languages Around the World (HLAW) conference in Lisbon.
   
• Grazia Di Pisa, Jason Rothman & Theo Marinis presented a poster entitled Gender and Number Agreement in Italian as a Heritage Language: Effect of Markedness and Proficiency at the HLAW conference on Thursday 19th May in Lisbon.
   
• Tamara Rathcke gave a presentation on Timing in speech and music of contemporary English and Scottish composers at the Speech Prosody conference 2022. The presentation is co-authored with Nicola West and Rachel Smith (from the University of Glasgow, UK).
   
• Georg Kaiser gave an invited talk at the Oberseminar Kolloquium Romanische Linguistik at the Institut für Romanistik of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen on May 25th, with the title Zur Verbzweitstellung in den romanischen Sprachen. Ergebnisse einer Paralleltextstudie (On the verb-second order in Romance. Results from a parallel text study.).
   
• On May 27th Tamara Rathcke was an invited discussant at the workshop on Gradience in Intonation (GRIN).
   
• Georg Kaiser also gave a talk together with Klaus von Heusinger (Universität zu Köln) at the workshop The Syntax of Causative, Perception and Restructuring Verbs in Romance and Latin at the Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy, on May 27th, with the title On the emergence of argument encoding in causatives constructions in Romance.

More News

• In June, Natasha Korotkova will be at the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI). She is giving an invited talk entitled Refining find at the workshop "Subjectivity in semantic interpretation" (joint work with Pranav Anand) and teaching a class Futurity, evidentiality, and modality: Cross-disciplinary perspectives (joint work with Fabrizio Cariani).
   
•  News form the ERUA (European Reform University Alliance):
  
  * ERUA multilingualism workshop

  The second ERUA multilingual workshop Plurilingual pedagogies will take place at Paris 8 on Thursday 30th June in the frame of the journée d’étude: “Plurilinguismes, transculturalités et créativités: Dialogues autour de pratiques éducatives”. Registration is possible via this link: For further information, please contact: Ramona Baumgartner.
  
  * ERUA staff visit
  The Paris 8 Language Center (CDL) and UKON's Language Institute (SLI) have been actively collaborating this year to set up a tandem program so that P8 students in the Master of Humanities program can enhance their learning of English as a second language and French for students at UKON University. In this context a P8 delegation visited the University of Konstanz for a week in May 2022 to elaborate on a long-term didactic and pedagogical framework. In addition to an intensive exchange with SLI members (director, academic and technical staff & students), the P8 colleagues were able to meet with other UKON actors with similar fields of interests. This kind of cooperative exchange has allowed first of all the sharing of efficient practices to improve the students' careers at all partner universities. It has also helped pave the way for closer collaboration on innovative pedagogical projects that would promote commitment and inclusiveness within the ERUA alliance.
  
  * ERUA multilingualism cross-alliance collaborations
  All European Universities Initiative (EUI) alliances of the second round interested in aspects of multilingualism were invited for an initial network (FOREU 2) meeting in April, organized by Ramona Baumgartner and Prof. Theo Marinis. Common topics across the alliances were presented and discussed. This platform will give alliance members the opportunity to share experiences and work together on thematical interests across alliances to jointly advance important Higher Education multilingualism topics such as language policies, language support structures, multilingual courses, technical tools and many more.

• Tamara Rathcke and Kathryn Franich (University of Delaware, USA) are co-hosting a special session on Timing and Rhythm Across LAnguages (TRALA) at the Speech Prosody conference 2022.
   
• Congratulation to Anamaria Bentea who was awarded an Independent Research Grant from the Zukunfstkolleg: Gender agreement in native and L2 French processing: Effects of structure and linear distance.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Eckardt, Regine, & George Walkden. 2022. A particle-like use of hwæþer: Wisdom’s questions in Boethius. In Xabier Artiagoitia, Sergio Monforte & Arantzazu Elordieta Alcibar (eds.), Discourse particles, 41-64. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (.pdf)
   
• Djärv, Kajsa. 2022. On the interpretation and distribution of embedded main clause syntax: new perspectives on complex discourse moves in "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1)" (online access)
   
• Hartmann, Frederik and Chiara Riegger (MA Student). The Burgundian language and its phylogeny. - A cladistical investigation. North-Western European Language Evolution (NOWELE): 75(1).
   
• Durrleman, S., Bentea, A. Prisecaru, A., Thommen, E. & Delage, H. Training syntax to enhance Theory of Mind in children with ASD. ”Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders”. (online access)
   
• Bacskai-Atkari, Julia. 2022. Discourse-driven asymmetries between embedded interrogatives and relative clauses in West Germanic. In: Nicholas Catasso, Marco Coniglio and Chiara De Bastiani (eds.), “Language change at the interfaces: Intrasentential and intersentential phenomena”, 189–214. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
   
• Zahner-Ritter, Katharina, Marieke Einfeldt, Daniela Wochner, Angela James, Nicole Dehé & Bettina Braun. 2022. Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function [Original Research]. “Frontiers in Communication, 7. (online access)

Acquisitions of the Library

• Zhang, Yu: Automatic detection of hate speech embedded in Chinese Sina Weibo
• McCulloch, Gretchen: Because Internet: understanding how language is changing
• Cuautli May, Maria de los Angeles: Language dominance in a trilingual: a case study
• Piccione, Mariapaola: Language dominance in Italian-German bilingual children
• Augst, Gerhard: Der Bildungswortschatz: Darstellung und Wörterverzeichnis
• Hentschel, Elke: Handbuch der deutschen Grammatik
• Köster, Lutz: Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache; Band 48 (2021)
• Bohnert, Niels: Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch; Band 2
• Elsen, Hilke: Neologismen: ein Studienbuch
• Ehrhardt, Claus: Sprachliche Höflichkeit
• Zimmer, Renate: Handbuch Sprache und Bewegung: alltagsintegrierte Sprachbildung in der Kita
• Mays, Wolfe: Linguistic analysis and phenomenology
• Linguistische Berichte; Heft 265-268 (2021)
• Sprache im technischen Zeitalter; 59. Jahrgang, Nr. 237-240 (2021)
• Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik; Jahrgang 51
• Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik; Band 81 (2021)
• Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur; Band 143 (2021)
• Deutsche Sprache; 49. Jahrgang (2021)
• Zeitschrift für Germanistik; Neue Folge, 31 (2021)
• English language and linguistics; Volume 25
• Journal of American studies; Volume 55
• Canadian American slavic studies; volume 55 (2021)
• Polonica; Tom 41 (2021)
• Poradnik jezykowy; 2021

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