Newsletter July 2019

This is the 133rd 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 July 2019 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in June 2019.

Visiting Konstanz

We welcome many guests this month:

Jenny Yu, a PhD student from The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University in Australia is visiting Bettina Braun’s group for 4 weeks from June 17th to July 19th as part of the Australian CoEDL (Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language) Mobility Grant scheme. Jenny's research focuses on the cross-linguistic prosodic processing of English and German.

Juhani Järvikivi and Anja Arnhold, (both University of Alberta) are visiting the department from June 3rd to July 22nd. Regina Hert, a PhD student from their group, will also be around for around the same time (June 5th - July 31st).

 Laura Devlesschouwer (Universiteit Antwerpen & Université Libre de Bruxelles), a PhD student (FWO candidate) in Belgium, will be visiting Konstanz from the 14th to the 17th July. Her research focusses on scalar implicatures, and she will give a SuP talk entitled A new look at Grice’s (1975) 'Logic and Conversation' on Monday the 15th July at 1.30 p.m. (in G 307). Laura is also happy to meet with semanticists and pragmaticists the very next day. Contact Sandy at sup@uni-konstanz.de if you wish to arrange a meeting.

Events at/by the Department

in July

We are pleased to announce followings talks:

• Friday 5th July: Elena Herburger (Georgetown Unversity): Conditionals with and without then, 10:00 am, Room G 227a
• Friday 12th July: Tyler Peterson (Arizona State University): Evidentiality and Pragmatic Blocking in Gitksan, 10:00 am, Room G 305
• Monday 15th July: Laura Devlesschouwer (Universiteit Antwerpen & Université libre de Bruxelles): A new look at Grice’s (1975) 'Logic and Conversation' at 13:30, Room G 307

 in June

Our department hosted following interesting workshops:

• Workshop: Expressing Evidence, 6th-8th (6th-7th in room V 1001 and 8th in room E 402) organized by Regine Eckardt, Todor Koev, Natasha Korotkova, and Sven Lauer.
• L3 Workshop: Multilingual Language Acquisition, Processing and Use, 7th-8th in room R 512 organized by Tanja Kupisch, Anika Lloyd-Smith, Marieke Einfeldt, Sonja Gumbsheimer, and Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares.
• Workshop: Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop 34 (CGSW 34), 14th-15th in K 7  organized by Andreas Trotzke and George Walkden.

Moreover there were two extra talks on aspects of Scandinavian syntax by visiting researchers:

• Tuesday 18th June: Hannah Booth (Ghent University): How to fill the prefield in Icelandic: the diachrony of Stylistic Fronting and expletives
• Tuesday 25th June: Kari Kinn (University of Oslo): Stability and change in American Norwegian nominals

On Monday 24th June Niels O. Schiller (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics [LUCL] & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition [LIBC]) gave a talk on Grammatical encoding in speech production: insights from the gender congruency effect.

Department and Research Colloquium in July

Department and Research Colloquium in June

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in July

• Andreas Trotzke will give an invited talk on Emphasis for intensity: A new approach to exclamatives at Linguistischer Arbeitskreis/Universität zu Köln on July 3rd.

• Christin Schätzle will give a talk on Verb-first and verb-second in the history of Icelandic together with Hannah Booth at the LFG conference 2019 in Canberra, Australia on July 9th.
  
  
• Antje Strauß will present a poster entitled Cortical entrainment in the alpha but not theta range predicts speech comprehension in noise at SAMBA 2019, an annual conference in the domain of Cognitive Neuroscience taking place from the 11th to the 12th of July in Salzburg, Austria.
  
  
• Svenja Schmid presents a poster with the title Where is why? – evidence from self-paced reading at the 3rd Crete Summer School of Linguistics at the University of Crete, Greece, from July 13th to 26th.
  
  
• Henri Kauhanen and George Walkden will be presenting a poster at the 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science (17th-20th July, University of Amsterdam) with the title Detecting constant rates of change in language: an a priori Monte Carlo power analysis.

•  Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Annebeth Buis, Livy Real, Martha Palmer and Valeria de Paiva will present their paper on Explaining Simple Natural Language Inference at the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW 2019) ACL 2019, in Florence, Italy.
  
  
• Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Richard Crouch and Valeria de Paiva will present their paper on GKR: Bridging the gap between symbolic/structural and distributional meaning representations at the 1st International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) ACL 2019, in Florence, Italy.
  
  
• Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Valeria de Paiva and Richard Crouch will present their paper on Composing noun phrase vector representations at the 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP) ACL 2019, in Florence, Italy.
  
  
• Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Rebecca Kehlbeck, Rita Sevastjanova, Katharina Kaiser, Georg Kaiser and Miriam Butt will present their paper on ParHistVis: Visualization of Parallel Multilingual Historical Data at the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change ACL 2019, in Florence, Italy.

in June

• Andreas Trotzke gave an invited talk on Functional categories, expressive meaning, and the notion of emphasis for intensity at Universidad de Alcalá on June 6th.

• Sandy Ciroux presented a poster entitled Multimodal Communicative Acts: What Words Cannot Do without a Hand at the LingCologne2019, a conference on multimodality that took place from the 6th to the 7th June at the Universität zu Köln.
  
  
• Maribel Romero gave an invited talk at the workshop Exhaustivity in Questions and Answers – Experimental and theoretical approaches on Exhaustivity, relative clauses and wh-phrases. Universität Tübingen, June 13th-15th, 2019.
  
  
• On June 14th Alexandra Rehn gave a talk at the Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop 34 (CGSW) with the title Adjectival inflection and feature marking in German DPs.
  
  
• Svenja Schmid gave a talk with the title Subject positions in Spanish why-questions at the syntax-pragmatics interface:experimental evidence at the 16th Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Phonology (WoSSP 2019) that took place at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, from June 17th to 18th.
  
  
• Doris Penka, Maribel Romero and Bettina Braun presented a poster on Licensing of NPIs in High Negation Polar Questions: Evidence from ‘either’ at the XPRAG 2019 conference at the University of Edinburgh, June 19th-21st.
  
  
• The babylab team attended the Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD) that took place from 13th to 15th June 2019 in Potsdam:
  
  

  - Nathalie Czeke, Katharina Zahner, Jasmin Rimpler, Bettina Braun & Sónia Frota. German infants fail to discriminate Portuguese rising vs. falling contours. (poster based on collaborative work with Sónia Frota in Lisbon.)

  - Katharina Zahner. The effect of pitch accent type on German infants’ stress perception: Summing up. (poster)
  
  
• Members of the department presented their work at the 3rd Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) conference from 17th to 19th June 2019 in Lecce, Italy:
  
  

  - Bettina Braun & María Biezma. Prenuclear L*+H but not L+H* leads to the activation of alternatives in German. (poster)

  - Nicole Dehé & Bettina Braun. Icelandic question intonation. (poster)

  - Jenny Yu (MARCS, Sydney) & Katharina Zahner. Compensation strategies in non-native English and German productions: Evidence for prosodic transfer and adjustment. (oral presentation)

• Sophie Kutscheid, Katharina Zahner and Bettina Braun presented a poster at Prominence between Cognitive Functions and Linguistic Structures (June 20th, COFLIS) - a Satellite Workshop at PaPE. The title of the poster was Underlying mechanisms in the perception of metrical prominence – The role of occurrence frequency of different pitch accent types.
  
  
•  Maribel Romero gave an invited talk at the workshop InqBnB3: Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary on Internally Headed Relative Clauses in Japanese. It took place at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, on June 26th-27th.
  
  
• Andreas Trotzke and Eva Wittenberg gave a talk on Mogst a weng a Schnitzala? A psycholinguistic approach to modality in the Bavarian nominal domain at the ICLAVE 10 conference/Leiden University on June 26th-28th.

Travelling

Carmen Widera will participate in the Lisbon Summer School in Linguistics 2019 from July 1st to 5th and in the XIV Forum for Linguistic Sharing on July 6th, both organized by the Linguistic Research Center of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. She will give a talk on O uso de 'ele' em construções impessoais em português europeu – um estudo experimental.

From 3rd June to 20th July 2019 Nicole Dehé is visiting researcher at the Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, Canada. She worked with Prof. Nancy Hedberg and conducted research in the area of prosody and its relationship to syntax.

More News

The second MultiMind training school, focusing on multilingualism and neuroscience, will take place from 1st-5th July 2019 at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience & Neurodynamics (CINN) at the University of Reading. From Konstanz, MultiMind PhD students Grazia di Pisa and Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares will be attending the training. The training school website and course schedule can be found here.

The Center for Multilingualism of our University is going to be five years old. You are cordially invited to take part in the anniversary celebration „Mehrsprachigkeit in Konstanz, Europa und der Welt. Perspektiven und Projekte für die Zukunft“ on July 5th at the ALM (Archäologisches Landesmuseum Baden-Württemberg in Konstanz) between 9:00 AND 18:00. Please register here.

The SFB-TRR 161 is going into a second round of funding. Linguistics is a part of this enterprise with project D02, in which Christin Schätzle will continue to work on the visualization of historical change, with special reference to Icelandic and Indo-Aryan. Miriam Butt is the PI.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Walkden, George, & Hejná, Michaela. 2018. Review of Mary Hayes & Allison Burkette (eds.), Approaches to teaching the history of the English language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 53, 256-260. (download)

Acquisitions of the Library

• Sharififar, Aida: Cluster breaking in L3 English of L1 Farsi speakers
• Cummins, Chri: Oxford handbook of experimental semantics and pragmatics
• Marx, Konstanze: Internetlinguistik
• Rhodes, Richard A.: Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa dictionary
• CLS; 53.2017
• Iberoromania; Número 89
• Italia dialettale; 3. Serie 15 = 79
• Diachronica; Volume 35 (2018)
• Studi di filologia italiana; Volume 76
• Studies in second language acquisition; Volume 40 (2018)
• Language typology and universals; Volume 71
• Zeitschrift für Slawistik; Band 63

Bild Tania Simeoni