Newsletter August 2023

This is the 182nd 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 August 2023 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in July 2023.

Events at/by the Department

Department and Research Colloquium in July

In July
The 4th edition of the Heritage Language Syntax worksho took place on July 3rd and 4th at the Kulturzentrum in Konstanz. The complete programme for the workshop can be accessed online.

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In August

• At the upcoming International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Tina Bögel is part of two poster presentations:
  *The phonetics-phonology-syntax interface: a computational implementation. (With Romi Hill, Justin Hofenbitzer, and Tianyi Zhao)
  *Language redundancy effects on F0:  a preliminary controlled study. (With Cong Zhang, Catherine Lai, Ricardo Napoleão de Souza, and Alice Turk).
   
• There are three posters from the department at AMLaP 2023 in San Sebastián / Donostia (Spain):
  * A verbal and non-verbal task battery for first- and second-order theory of mind - data from adults and primary school children from Germany and Greece.
  Anna Czypionka, Maria Andreou, Dafni-Vaia Bagioka, Angelika Golego, Theo Marinis, Eleni Peristeri, Arhonto Terzi
  *Wolf-hound vs. sled-dog: ERP evidence reveals that semantic constituent properties are accessed during compound recognition.
  Anna Czypionka, Mariya Kharaman, Carsten Eulitz
  * Transfer effects or a learning mechanism? Pronoun resolution in adult L2 learners of German by speakers of null- and overt-subject languages.
  Anna Czypionka, Angelika Golegos, Lisa Hindelang, Gladys Laporte, Theo Marinis.
  *Processing which-questions in Romanian: A visual-world eye-tracking study with adults and children. Anamaria Bentea, Theo Marinis

In July

• Together with Robert Daugs (University of Kiel), Ulrike Schneider gave a talk titled Negate me not, negate me never. Cross-varietal distributional skews in modal negation from a diachronic perspective at ICEHL 22 in Sheffield, July 3rd–6th.
   
• Several members of the department presented at the 24th Diachronic Generative Syntax conference in Paris, July 4th-7th.
  * Henri Kauhanen gave a talk at the workshop on formal approaches to language contact with the title Contact-induced change as an emergent property of complex systems: Linking population dynamics, linguistic theory and psychology of learning.
  * Raquel Montero Estebaranz gave a talk in the main session with the title Mood alternations: The diachronic development of the polarity subjunctive and
   * Alexandra Rehn is giving a talk with former Konstanz postdoc Hannah Booth on Possession, case and the OCP in the history of High and Low German. (https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/hannah.booth)
   * George Walkden gave an invited talk with the title Adult language acquisition and change.
   * There were also posters by Molly Rolf on A formal account of diachronic case and adposition change and
   * Sigríður Björnsdóttir, Lisa Gotthard, Chiara Riegger & George Walkden on Raising out of control.
   
• Anna Czypionka presented a talk titled Sentence processing at the  syntax-pragmatics interface: Interindividual variation and ASD-related psychological traits at the 19th International Pragmatics Conference Brussels, Belgium (IPC18 Brussels 2023), 9th - 14th July 2023.
   
• Together with Ash Asudeh and Daniel Siddiqi, Tina Bögel gave a talk on Modelling exponents: Vocabulary items at this year's LFG conference in Rochester, USA (21st July - 25th July 2023).
   
• The LFG’23 conference took place in Rochester July 21st-24th. It featured a ParGram meeting with the following talks:
  * Mark-Matthias Zymla on his on-going work developing new computational tools for glue semantics
  * Tafseer Ahmed on his work on converting Universal Dependency representations to LFG functional structures.
  - It also featured the following talks in the main session:
  * Miriam Butt, Tafseer Ahmed Khan and Lucrezia Carnesale Experiencers vs. Agents in Urdu/Hindi nominalized verbs of perception
  * Ash Asudeh, Tina Bögel, Daniel Siddiqi Modelling exponents
   
• Hyewon Jang gave a talk entitled What triggers sarcasm and what role does humor play in it? at the International Society of Humor Studies Conference in Boston, USA. She also presented her research conducted with Diego Frassinelli and Bettina Braun at the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) in Sydney. The title of this work was: Intended and Perceived Sarcasm between Close Friends: What Triggers Sarcasm and what Gets Conveyed?.
  In Toronto Hyewon Jang presented her research conducted with Qi Yu and Diego Frassinelli at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023). The title of this work was: Figurative Language Processing: A Linguistically Informed Feature Analysis of the Behavior of Language Models and Humans.

More News

•  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.
   
• The members of the project MECORE are teaching a class called Semantic properties and combinatorial restrictions of attitude predicates at the 34th European Summer School in Logic Language and Information (July 31st to August 11th at the University of Ljubljana).
   
• George Walkden is co-organizing a workshop (with Adam Schembri) on Sociolinguistic typology: advances and challenges at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) annual conference, 29th August-1st September 2023. George will be introducing the workshop with a paper on Sociolinguistic typology beyond morphology, and Raquel Montero will be presenting in the workshop on Internal and External Causes of Change: A Diachronic Corpus Study of Mood Variation. Gemma McCarley will also be presenting on Accounting for Orality in the Diachronic Study of Null Subject Use across Latin American Spanish.
   
• In the new issue of the Cluster Magazine /In_Equality/ on the topic of Information, Language, Power, you can read articles written by several members of the Linguistics Department, including Miriam Butt, Regine Eckardt, Anika Lloyd-Smith, Tanja Kupisch, Sergio Zanotto, and Judit Vári. Enjoy reading!
   
• Great additions to the list of Erasmus+ partners and study abroad offer of the department!
  We are very pleased that from the academic year 2024/25 onwards, the department can offer its students two new study abroad opportunities to renowned institutions with a great course offer in linguistics:
  * for BA students we will be able to offer 4 places for one semester each (or 2 places for stays over the entire academic year) to the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland,
  * for MA students we will have 2 semester places to study in the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University.
  
  Given the compatibility of our programmes and courses (Joint Honors/Major in Linguistics at TCD, MA in Language Science at Stockholm University), we hope students at both ends will take up this great opportunity! Thanks to the increased mobility grant rates offered by Erasmus+, students will receive € 600 per months fully studied abroad and may receive top-up grants as well (e.g. if travelling environmentally friendly).
  
  Of course these new partnerships are also open to staff members of the department and those interested in spending a short teaching and/or training period at any of our partner institutions are welcome to get in touch with Melanie Hochstätter (Erasmus+ coordination).

Publications by Members of the Department

• Ömer Demirok (Boğaziçi) and Deniz Özyıldız published a paper called On the Prosodic Exponence of Universal Quantification in Turkish Relative Clauses in the Theoretical Studies on Turkic Languages special issue of Languages.
   
• Trotzke, Andreas. 2023. Non-Canonical Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
   
• Wolf-hound vs. sled-dog: Neurolinguistic evidence for semantic decomposition in the recognition of German noun-noun compounds. Anna Czypionka, Mariya Kharaman and Carsten Eulitz. to appear in “Frontiers in Psychology, section Cognition, special issue `Animacy in Cognition: Effects, Mechanisms, and Theories”´.
   
• Tamara Rathcke published a paper in the Heritage Language Journal: Zuban, Y., Rathcke, T., Serbian, S. Do Different Majority Languages Lead to Different Intonational Grammars? A Case Study of Yes/No-Questions in Heritage Russian. (online access)
   
• Booth, Hannah & Rehn, Alexandra. 2023. The Possessor Linking Construction in Middle Low German and Alemannic. In: Speyer, Augustin & Jenny Diener (Hrsg.): “Syntax aus Saarbrücker” Sicht 5, ZDL Beiheft. Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag.
   
• Jang, H., Braun, B., & Frassinelli, D. (2023). Intended and Perceived Sarcasm between Close Friends: What Triggers Sarcasm and what Gets Conveyed? In “proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: CogSci 2023”. Sydney, Australia.
   
• Jang, H., Yu, Q., & Frassinelli, D. (accepted, 2023b). Figurative Language Processing: A Linguistically Informed Feature Analysis of the Behavior of Language Models and Humans. In “proceedings of the of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings)”: ACL 2023. Toronto, Canada.
   
• Malinka Pila. 2023. Aspect lexemes and secondary imperfectives in Resian/ Vidski leksemi in sekundarni imperfektivi v rezijanščini, Slavistična Revija 71/1, 61-78. (online access)

Acquisitions of the Library

• Mulot, Marie-Ange: The effect of syntactic complexity and speaker sex on the perception of speaker charisma
• Baumann, Anne Dorothee: ParGram: development of a grammar fragment for Spanish in XLE
• Meng, Sijing: Comparative study of Chinese and English word-formation
• Bryant, Doreen: Performative Zugänge zu Deutsch als Zweitsprache (DaZ) ein Lehr- und Praxisbuch
• Winter, Christoph: Der Kompass der Nordfriesen: sprachliche Kodierung absoluter Orientierung am Beispiel der Himmelsrichtungen und Richtungspartikeln im Nordfriesischen
• Forni, Marco: Gramatica ladin gherdëina
• Videsott, Paul: Les Ladins des Dolomites
• Corbella, Dolores: Perspectives de recherche en linguistique et philologie romanes ; Volume 1 and 2
• Hennecke, Angelika: Spanisch und indigene Sprachen in Kolumbien: Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachenpolitik
• Bowern, Claire Louise: The Oxford guide to Australian languages
• V3 and Resumptive Adverbials, 2017, Gent, Veranstaltung: Adverbial resumption in verb second languages
• Applied linguistics/publ. in coop. with AAAL American Association for Applied Linguistics; AILA International Association of Applied Linguistics; BAAL British Association for Applied Linguistics;...
• Linguistic typology; Volume 26
• Das DaZ-Buch; 2, CD mit MP3-Audio-Daten: CD mit MP3-Audio-Daten: Lehrwerk für den intensiven Spracherwerb in der Sekundarstufe
• English studies; Volume 103 (2022)
• Iberoromania; número 97 (2023)
• Italian studies/publ. by the Society for Italian Studies; Volume 77 (2022)
• Italianistica; Anno 51 (2022)
• Revista de filología española; volumen 101 (2021)
• Revista internacional de linguística iberoamericana; volumen 21,1 = N°1 (41)
• Romanische Forschungen; 134. Band (2022)
• Canadian American slavic studies; Volume 56 (2022)
• Journal of the American Oriental Society; Volume 142 (2022)

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