Newsletter November 2021

This is the 161st 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 November 2021 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in October 2021.

New to Konstanz

The department is welcoming Dr Duangkamol (Nack) Srismith who is joining us from the Max-Planck Institute in Tübingen. Nack is a cognitive scientist with a wealth of experience working on multimodal affective perception. She is going to contribute her expertise to the project "Perceptions of Political Charisma", running as part of the research cluster "The Politics of Inequality" and will be working Prof Tamara Rathcke and her team. Nack will be based in E209 - do drop by and say hi if you are around.

We are also pleased to welcome Sergio Zanotto as a new PhD student in the Department of Linguistics. He is funded via a scholarship via the Politics of Inequality Cluster and is affilaited with the Graduate School of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (GSBS). His work involves computational analyses of political discourse in Italian and his main supervisor is Miriam Butt.

Visiting Konstanz

We are pleased to welcome the following visitors to the University of Konstanz:

David Ubua Etta is in Konstanz via a Hertz Fellowship associated with the Zukunftskolleg. He is a PhD candidate from Nigeria who is working on the Phonology of Bokyi (a Bantu or Bantoid language). The local hosts are Miriam Butt and Theo Marinis.

Mans Hulden is visiting Konstanz via a Senior Fellowship in the Politics of Inequality Cluster. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work in computational linguistics focuses on the development of foundational natural language processing technologies, most notably (for us) finite-state morphology, often working with minority languages and languages with limited available digital resources. He is a co-investigator in the SSHRC-funded "21st Century Tools for Indigenous Languages" project which works to support the revitalization and daily use of several endangered North American languages by developing modern technological tools and resources in collaboration with communities of speakers.

Ayesha Zafar is in Konstanz via a Faculty Development grant from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. She is a lecturer who is simultaneously pursuing a PhD degree at the University of Gujrat and is working on lexical semantic resources for Urdu.

Events at/by the Department

in November
The lecture series "The Multilingual Mind: Lecture series on multilingualism across disciplines" will start again on the 2nd of November and will run until February 2022. The lectures will take place Tuesdays from 17.00 until 18.30 (CET/UTC+01). The programme includes a selection of senior and junior researchers; the first talk will be by Sergio Soares (University of Konstanz) on Neurophysiological oscillatory correlates of heritage bilingualism. Please visit the MultiMind website for the programme and registration.

in October
TiPToP (Trends in pedagogical transmission of prosody) took place October 12th-13th, 2021 via the conference tool gather.town. The workshop was funded by the Zukunftskolleg and the Research Unit Questions at the Interfaces and organised by members from SpeechNet BaWü.

Department and Research Colloquium in November

Department and Research Colloquium in October

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In November

• Josef Bayer is 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 is: What the wh-agreement marker 'n reveals about wh-movement in Bavarian.
   
• Andreas Trotzke is invited speaker at the workshop Ways of expressing modality at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, November 15th-16th. He will give a talk on How to do things with German particles: The syntax-pragmatics interface in the foreign language classroom.
   
• George Walkden is giving a talk on The diachrony of hypotaxis and parataxis at the DCLS Colloquium at the University of Zürich on 17th November.  He is also giving a talk titled “An adjectival article in the early West Germanic languages? at the Jena-Göttingen Colloquium on Germanic Linguistics on 19th November.

In October

• Julia Bacskai-Atkari, Julia gave a talk on Afrikaans relative clauses and the principles of morphological and syntactic markedness at the Afrikaans Grammar Workshop III (AGW3), Amsterdam, Meertens Instituut, 30th September – 1st October 2021.
   
• Antje Strauß and Cecile Pacoret presented a poster entitled Finding endogenous theta oscillations in primary auditory cortex at CuttingEEG 2021. The conference took place in person in Aix-en-Provence from October 4th-7th.
   
• Mariya Kharaman, Anna Czypionka and Carsten Eulitz presented Licensing at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics: Theta-band oscillations reflect low semantic value of discourse particles at a Slide Slam Presentation at the 2021 SNL (Society for the Neurobiology of Language) Annual Meeting, virtually on October 5th-8th.
   
•  Bettina Braun gave an invited talk on Voice quality classification in different speech styles and languages on the 11th of October at the Phonetics group at the University of Zürich.
   
• Anna Czypionka gave an invited talk at the Language in Autism group meeting (October 11th 2021) at the University of Amsterdam: Interindividual differences in licensing at the interfaces - preliminary data and planned experiments, and a second invited talk at the Language and Cognition Group meeting (October 14^th) at the  University of Leiden Licensing at the interfaces - question-sensitive discourse particles and negative polarity items in sentence comprehension.
   
• Andreas Trotzke gave an invited talk on "Information structure and expressivity" at the University of Cologne on October 20th.
   
• Several members of the department presented their work at the MECORE kickoff workshop (October 21st-23rd): Kajsa Djärv and Maribel Romero gave a talk titled Emotive factives and strong exhausitvity: an experimental investigation. Kajsa Djärv also presented on Embedded main clause phenomena: new perspectives on embedded illocutionary acts. Deniz Özyıldız gave a talk about Question embedding, neg-raising, and lexical aspect. Nadine Theiler gave a talk titled Pragmatics intrudes into presupposition projection from wh-complements.
   
• Henri Kauhanen, on 23rd of October, gave a talk on Modelling the evolutionary dynamics of sociolinguistic stratification at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49 (NWAV 49), (Austin, Texas / online).
   
• Svenja Schmid, Anja Weingart and Georg A. Kaiser presented their paper A qualitative parallel text study on ‘why’-interrogatives in Spanish varieties at the V Encuentro de Sintaxis de los Dialectos del Español (SPADISYNI V) (Spanish Dialects Meeting) in Cáceres, 28th-29th October 2021.

More News

• 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.
   
• Bettina Braun has been granted a DFG project on regional variability in the input and the development of word recognition in toddlers. Using a serious of perception experiments, she investigates the development and nature of lexical representations in children who grow up with two varieties of their language (e.g., Alemannic and Standard German). Data collection will partly be done using the BabyApp, which makes it possible to gather data in a home environment.
   
• The Zukunftskolleg is glad that Diego Frassinelli, Junior Professor in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Department of Linguistics, has been selected to take part in the ICA 4 and will be representing the University of Konstanz. The title of his project is: The Effects of Culture and Society on Natural Language Models. You can find more information here.
   
• Frederik Hartmann successfully defended his doctoral dissertation Germanic phylogeny: a computational investigation using Bayesian inference and agent-based models on 9th September. His examiners were George Walkden, Gerhard Jäger (Tübingen) and Regine Eckardt. Frederik will be continuing to work with George on the project Germanic dispersion beyond trees and waves.
   
• The Research Unit Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC) has just been approved for funding by the DFG, and will be starting in 2022. George Walkden has a project as part of this group: Modelling lexical diffusion in syntax: non-finite complementation in Modern English. Watch this space for more information! SILPAC is a multi-university collaboration led by Prof. Carola Trips (Mannheim).
   
• Tamara Rathcke is giving a plenary lecture on cross-linguistic rhythm at TipTop later this month.
   
• September marked the beginning of the Processing and Production in Heritage Speakers: The Role of Disambiguating Cues (ProHeritageSpeakers) project led by Anamaria Bentea, with Theo Marinis and Tanja Kupisch as supervisors. By focusing on Romanian heritage speakers (HSs), with German as the second language, this EU-funded project will examine whether HSs use morphosyntactic cues when comprehending heritage language input in real-time. It will also look into how the presence of similar grammatical information in the dominant second language modulates comprehension and production in the heritage language.
   
• Andreas Trotzke has been an Invited Professor at the University of Geneva in September and taught the PhD course The syntax-pragmatics interface (September 22nd-24th).

Publications by Members of the Department

• 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.
   
• Durrleman S. & Bentea A., (2021) Locality in the acquisition of object A’-dependencies: insights from French,mGlossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5876
   
• Beavers, J., M. Everdell, K. Jerro, H. Kauhanen, A. Koontz-Garboden, E. LeBovidge & S. Nichols (2021) States and changes-of-state: a crosslinguistic study of the roots of verbal meaning. Language, 97(3), https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0254
   
• Ulbrich, Christiane & Alexander Werth (2021): What is Intra-individual Variation in Language? In: Alexander Werth, Lars Bülow, Simone E. Pfenninger & Markus Schiegg (Hgg.): “Intra-Individual Variation in Language”. Berlin & Boston: Mouton de Gruyter (Trends in Linguistics. 363), 9-43.
   
• Ulbrich, Christiane (2021): Everyone is different, so everyone is the same – intraindividual variation in second language acquisition. In: Alexander Werth, Lars Bülow, Simone E. Pfenninger & Markus Schiegg (Hgg.): “Intra-Individual Variation in Language”. Berlin & Boston: Mouton de Gruyter (Trends in Linguistics. 363), 47-46.
   
• Bacskai-Atkari, Julia (2021) Verdoppelungen in Relativsätzen und der Status von Relativpartikeln in Dialekten des Deutschen. In: Augustin Speyer and Julia Hertel (eds.) „Syntax aus Saarbrücker Sicht“ 4: Beiträge der SaRDiS-Tagung zur Dialektsyntax. Stuttgart: Steiner. 11–30.
   
• Tamara Rathcke published an open-access paper on rhythm issues in dyslexia: Rathcke, T.; Lin, C.-Y. Towards a Comprehensive Account of Rhythm Processing Issues in Developmental Dyslexia. "Brain Sciences". 2021, 11, 1303. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11101303
   
• N. Korotkova and P. Anand. Find, must and conflicting evidence. In P. G. Grosz, L. Mart ́ı, H. Pearson, Y. Sudo, and S. Zobel (Eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25, 515–532. University College London and Queen Mary University of London. (online access)

Acquisitions of the Library

• Adamczak-Krysztofowicz, Sylwia: Angewandte Linguistik: neue Herausforderungen und Konzepte
• House, Juliane: Cross-cultural pragmatics
• Hlavac, Jim: vDiaspora Language Contact: The Speech of Croatian Speakers Abroad
• Liebsch, Lisa: Fundamental frequency differences of German-Russian bilinguals
• Derenowski, Marek: Insights into senior foreign language education
• Mikolič, Vesna: Language and culture in the intercultural world
• Malinowski, David: Language Teaching in the Linguistic Landscape: Mobilizing Pedagogy in Public Space
• Matticchio, Isabella: Mehrsprachigkeit am Arbeitsplatz
• Ji, Meng: The Oxford handbook of translation and social practices
• Bücker, Jörg: Perspektiven linguistischer Sprachkritik (... Sammlung von Beiträgen dar, die im März 2012 auf der "Arbeitstagung Linguistische Pragmatik (ALP)" zum Rahmenthema "Sprachwandel und und Sprachkritik" präsentiert worden sind)
• Zsiga, Elizabeth C.: The phonology/phonetics interface
• Biber, Douglas: Register variation online
• Mackey, Alison: Second language research: methodology and design
• Brügge, Walburga: So lernen Kinder sprechen: Kinder in ihrer Sprachentwicklung begleiten
• Salmons, Joseph: Sound change
• Goedemans, Rob: The study of word stress and accent: theories, methods and data
• Broders, Simone: Academic skills: an introduction for English and American studies
• Silvagni, Federico: La gramática de ser y estar
• Gabriel, Christoph: Romanische Sprachwissenschaft
• Italian journal of linguistics; Volume 32 (2020)
• Langages; 217-220 (2020)
• Modern philology; Volume 118 (2020/2021)
• English studies in Canada; Volume 44
• Italianistica; Anno 49 (2020)

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