Newsletter December 2021

This is the 162nd 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 December 2021 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in November 2021.

New to Konstanz

This month we welcome Ilaria Venagli to our department! Ilaria is starting a PhD with Tanja and Theo on syntactic processing and dyslexia funded through an LGFS scholarship. She comes to us from The University of Venice. Her research interests are in syntax, processing, second language acquisition and reading disorders. If you see her, say “Ciao”!
 

We also welcome Laura Hund, who has just gotten her degree in French and Political Science. Laura will support the Romanistik-team, teaching French linguistics, and she is also involved in the Inequality Cluster, working on language assessment with Anika and Tanja. Laura is planning a PhD on the effects of subtitles and captions in the acquisition of French as a foreign language. Happy to have you with us, Laura!

Events at/by the Department

in November
The lecture series "The Multilingual Mind: Lecture series on multilingualism across disciplines" started again on the 2nd of November and will run until February 2022. The lectures take place Tuesdays from 17.00 until 18.30 (CET/UTC+01). The programme includes a selection of senior and junior researchers. Please visit the MultiMind website for the programme and registration.
 

Department and Research Colloquium in December

Department and Research Colloquium in November

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In December

• Anamaria Bentea will present her work in collaboration with Stephanie Durrleman on Person Matters: Relative Clauses in the Acquisition of French at the Workshop on Acquisition at Going Romance XXXV, Amsterdam (online, December 1st).
   
• Svenja Schmid will present a poster entitled Examining the vulnerability of the syntax-discourse interface: the role of the methodology in Heritage Italian why-interrogatives at Going Romance 2021. The conference will be held online from December 1st-3rd (organization: University of Amsterdam).
   
• Kaja Gregorc will participate at the science slam battle during the ERUA First Annual Summit on the 3rd of December with her video entitled Are they really sponges?
   
• Marieke Einfeldt and Bettina Braun will present a poster entitled Pitch accent distribution and tonal alignment in Swiss German and German children at the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI) taking place in Sonderborg, Denmark, December 6th-9th.
   
• Intonation first, integration with context second: Fragile interactions between intonation and and the pragmatics of Wh-Questions is the title of the poster that will be presented by Justin Hofenbitzer, Bettina Braun and Maribel Romero at the “1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation” (TAI) in Sonderborg, Denmark, December 6th-9th.
   
• On December 8th, Georg A. Kaiser is giving an invited talk at the Kolloquium Romanistische Linguistik at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: Zur Verbzweitstellung in den romanischen Sprachen. Ergebnisse aus einer Paralleltextstudie (‘Verb-second order in Romance. Results from a parallel text study’).

In November

• Anamaria Bentea presented Intervention in the Absence of Lexical Restriction: Effects of Pronoun Type on Relative Clause Comprehension (work with Stephanie Durrleman) at BUCLD46, Boston (online, November 4th-7th). She also gave an invited talk on Not all wh-dependencies are created equal: Processing of multiple wh-questions in Romanian children and adults at the Workshop on the Acquisition of Heritage Languages, Bucharest (online, November 20th).
   
• Several members of the department presented their work at the Words in the World International Conference 2021 (WOW 2021), November 26th-27th, 2021.
  - Kaja Gregorc and Theo Marinis gave a talk on The role of input variability in vocabulary learning in proficient L2 learners.
  - Angelika Golegos and Theo Marinis presented a poster on Pronoun resolution in monolingual German adults.
   
• Josef Bayer was an invited speaker in the „Saarbrücker Runder Tisch für Dialektsyntax // Saarbrücken Roundtable of Dialect Syntax // Table Ronde de la Syntaxe Dialectale de Sarrebruck (SaRDiS)“, 5th –6th  November 2021. The title of his talk was: What the wh-agreement marker 'n reveals about wh-movement in Bavarian.
   
• Andreas Trotzke was invited speaker at the workshop Ways of expressing modality at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, November 15th-16th. He gave a talk on How to do things with German particles: The syntax-pragmatics interface in the foreign language classroom.
   
• George Walkden gave a talk on The diachrony of hypotaxis and parataxis at the DCLS Colloquium at the University of Zürich on 17th November. He also gave a talk titled “An adjectival article in the early West Germanic languages? at the Jena-Göttingen Colloquium on Germanic Linguistics on 19th November.

More News

• Congratulations to Tina Bögel and Alice Turk (University of Edinburgh) who have been granted a 3-year collaborative DFG-AHRC project. They will investigate whether prosodic structure is the interface between language and speech and how this interface can be implemented in a formal model of grammar. Co-I is Catherine Lai, also from the University of Edinburgh.
   
• Registration for the Annual Summit of the European Reform University Alliance (ERUA) is possible till 1st December https://erua-eui.eu/summit/!
  
  The Summit will be held as an online event from 2nd to 4th December 2021, with a Science Slam battle, in the context of a workshop on Empowering higher education communities across Europe: Creating educational pathways and social cohesion in the light of lived multilingualism: https://erua-eui.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Agenda_Workshop3.pdf
  
  The workshop will give voices and space to explore strategies and opportunities for the development of European educational and research communities in the light of European linguistic diversity. The workshop will conclude with an open discussion on Multilingualism in higher education in Europe: do our Universities reflect the language diversity of our communities?.
   
• The second ERUA language café took place on Monday 22nd November, organized jointly with the Erasmus student network (ESN) Konstanz and Café Mondial Konstanz. Various languages could be practiced, listened to and experienced in the wonder.me lounge. The next edition will be organized soon. If you are interested in keeping informed about this or other events, write an email to erua@uni-konstanz.de.
   
• As for this semester, our lectorateships for Basque language and culture as well as for Catalan language and culture have been reoccupied. The new holders of the positions are Arantzazu Aizpurua Araconda and Andreea-Isabella Stefan. Both lectureships are (co)financed by the respective cultural institutes, Etxepare and Ramon Llull.
   
• Congratulation to Todor Koev who has his book Parenthetical Meaning accepted at Oxford University Press. The book will appear in the spring of 2022.
   
• Anna Czypionka stayed at the University of Leiden for 2x2 weeks (September/October 2021) for co-teaching and setting up collaborations.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Walkden, George. 2021. Against mechanisms: towards a minimal theory of change. Journal of Historical Syntax 5(33), 1–27. (online access)
   
• Kupisch, Tanja & Maria Polinsky. 2021. Language history on fast forward: Innovations in heritage languages and diachronic change. "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition". (online access)
   
• Bögel, Tina. 2021. Function words at the interface: a two-tier approach. "Languages 6"(4). Open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/6/4/197
   
• Bögel, Tina. 2021. Prosody and its interfaces. In M. Dalrymple (ed), Forthcoming: "The Handbook of Lexical Functional Gramma"r. Berlin: Language Science Press. Open access: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/312
   
• Svenja Schmid, Klaus von Heusinger, Georg A. Kaiser (2021): On word order variation and information structure in Peninsular Spanish and Italian ‘why’-interrogatives. ”Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos” 63, 1–17, e021025. (online access)
   
• Oliviéri, Michèle, Georg A. Kaiser, Katerina Palasis, Michael Zimmermann & Richard Faure (2020): Quand la dialectologie, l’acquisition et la dialectologie se parlent: étude comparative des pronoms sujets en français et en occitan. In: J. Sibille (éd.), “La microvariation syntaxique dans les langues romanes de France. Actes du colloque Symila, Toulouse, 11-12 juin 2015”. Limoges: Lambert-Lucas, 81–98.
   
• Christiane Ulbrich has published an open access paper on phonetic accommodation: Ulbrich, C. (2021). Phonetic accommodation on the segmental and the suprasegmental level of speech in native-nonnative collaborative tasks. In Barbara Gili Fivela, Cinzia Avesani, Michelina Savino (eds.) “PaPE 2019 Special Issue Language contact and speaker accommodation. Language and Speech”. (DOI: 10.1177/00238309211050094)
   
• Eva Wittenberg & Andreas Trotzke. 2021. A psycholinguistic investigation into diminutive strategies in the East Franconian NP: Little schnitzels stay big, but little crooks become nicer. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 33, 405-436
   
• Trotzke, Andreas. 2021. Review of: David Adger, Language unlimited: The science behind our most creative power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Language 97, 629-635.
   
• Papastefanou, T., Marinis, T. & D. Powell (2021). Development of Reading Comprehension in Bilingual and Monolingual Children—Effects of Language Exposure. “Languages”, 6 (4), 166.
   
• Eva Wittenberg & Andreas Trotzke. 2021. Semantic incorporation and discourse prominence: Experimental evidence from English pronoun resolution. “Journal of Pragmatics” 186, 87-99.
   
• Andreas Trotzke & Laia Mayol. 2021. Catalan focus markers as discourse particles. “Journal of Linguistics“ 57, 871-905.

Acquisitions of the Library

• Barabashova, Kristina: Detection of sigmatism with the aid of machine learning for German speakers
• Furlani, Noemi: Language abilities of Italian-German bilingual children
• Baumeister, Franziska: Verbal and non-verbal Theory of Mind in healthy German adults: piloting the MiLA toolkit
• Merenyi, Jessica Dorothea: A user-interactive application to enhance computer assisted language-learning (CALL)
• Riesener, Niclas: Automatisierte Analyse von COVID-19 bezogenen Tweets im deutschen Sprachraum
• Lin, Chifei: Influence of typological distance and L2 status on accent in L3
• Lieber, Rochelle: Introducing morphology
• Peng, Tingting: Language use in a multilingual company: a case study of Volkswagen Group in China
• Wirrer, Jan: Sprachwissen - Spracherfahrung: Untersuchungen zum metasprachlichen Wissen sprachwissenschaftlicher Laien
• Smereka, Joanna: Textlinguistische Untersuchungen zu mittelalterlichen deutschen Testamenten von Krakauer Bürgern
• Wood, Dustin M. Frazier: Anglo-Saxonism and the idea of Englishness in eighteenth-century Britain
• Kraebel, A. B.: Biblical commentary and translation in later medieval England: experiments in interpretation
• Moessner, Lilo: The history of the present English subjunctive: a corpus-based study of mood and modality
• Ramírez, J. Jesse: Work: The labors of language, culture, and history in North America
• Lauret, Bertrand: Enseigner la prononciation du français: questions et outils
• Röver, Carsten: Teaching and testing second language pragmatics and interaction: a practical guide
• Eckkrammer, Eva Martha: Manual del español en América
• Chalier, Marc: Les normes de prononciation du français: une étude perceptive panfrancophone
• Petrov, Ivan: The development of the Bulgarian literary language: from incunabula to first grammars, late fifteenth-early seventeenth century
• Berns, Janine: Linguistics in the Netherlands; 2019. 50th annual conference of the Linguistic Society of the Netherlands, Utrecht, 2nd february, 20
• Linguistics in the Netherlands; 2020
• Leuvense bijdragen; Volume 103 (2021)
• Studi italiani di linguistica teorica e applicata; Anno 49 (2020)
• L'Italia dialettale; Volume 82 = Serie 3, 18 (2021)
• Studi di filologia italiana; Volume 79 (2021)
• Studia neophilologica; Vol. 91 (2019)
• Studi e saggi linguistici; 58 (2020)
• Studi francesi; Anno 64, fasc.1-3 = 190-192 (2020)
• Rivista degli studi orientali; Nuova serie, volume 93 (2020)

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