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Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz

Issue CLX: October 2021

This is the 160th 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 October 2021 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in September 2021.

New to Konstanz

Nadine Theiler joined the Research Unit Questions at the Interfaces in a joint post-doctoral position in projects P1 and P3. She received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2019 and held a postdoctoral associate position at the University of Connecticut during 2019-2021. Nadine's research centers around the semantics and pragmatics of questions of all kinds, but with a special fondness for non-canonical question uses.

This month we welcome Colin Davis to our department! Colin is starting a position as junior professor in English linguistics, and comes to us from MIT, where he completed his PhD, and USC, where he has been working as a postdoctoral researcher. He has broad research interests in syntax and morpho(phono)logy, varieties of English, and cross-linguistic variation. If you see him, say hello!

This month also Dr. Judit Vari is joining our department. Judit did her PhD at the University of Bangor, specialising in sociolinguistics and researching into language policies and attitudes toward language minorities in multilingual Belgium and Luxembourg. At Konstanz, she will be working in the multidisciplinary team of the Inequality Cluster, contributing to the project "Perceptions of Political Charisma". A warm welcome to Judit!

Leaving Konstanz

Alexander Pfaff leaves us this month to join a project led by Ellen Brandner at the University of Stuttgart, just up the road. We thank him for his contributions to the department and wish him well in his future endeavours.

Visiting Konstanz

Prof. Kjell Johan Sæbø from the university of Oslo will be a research guest at the linguistic department from October 5th - 14th, 2021.
His office is in H 136.
If you want to meet with Kjell Johan, please contact Regine Eckardt (or Kjell Johan directly) for an appointment.

Events at/by the Department

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

in September
The first in-person Consortium Meeting of the DAAD+IKY (IKYDA) project ‘German-Greek toolkit for Theory of Mind and Language in Autism (MiLA) was hosted at the University of Patras from 20th-24th September 2021. The MiLA project is a collaborative project between the University of Konstanz, the University of Cologne, the University of Patras and the University of Thessaly that aims at strengthening academic relations between Universities, developing research protocols on the language abilities and Theory of Mind of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, conducting collaborative research, providing training to young researchers and knowledge transfer activities to academic and non-academic audiences.

Department and Research Colloquium in October

28.10 Jiayin Gao (University of Edinburgh): Recurrent sound change is drawn from a pool of systematic variation

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In October

  • Julia Bacskai-Atkari, Julia will give 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.
     
  •  Bettina Braun will give 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. 
     
  • Mariya Kharaman, Anna Czypionka and Carsten Eulitz will present 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, taking place virtually on October 5th-8th.
     
  • Henri Kauhanen, on 23rd of October, will give a talk on Modelling the evolutionary dynamics of sociolinguistic stratification at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49 (NWAV 49), (Austin, Texas / online).

in September

  • Maribel Romero gave an invited talk titled Some notes comparing 'many', 'often' and GEN at the online workshop Generics and Stereotypes in Language, organized by the University of Amsterdam on September 15th and 17th, 2021.
     
  • Two papers were presented at the Interspeech taking place from August 30th to September 3rd in Brno (hybrid form):

    Bettina Braun, Nicole Dehé, Marieke Einfeldt, Daniela Wochner and Katharina Zahner-Ritter presented their paper Testing acoustic voice quality classification across languages and speech styles

    Marieke Einfeldt, Rita Sevastjanova, Katharina Zahner-Ritter, Ekaterina Kazak and Bettina Braun presented their paper Reliable estimates of interpretable cue effects with Active Learning in psycholinguistic research
     
  • Svenja Schmid and Laura González López presented their paper On vocative positions in Spanish wh-interrogatives: new insights into the left periphery at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE).
     
  • On 2nd September, Maria F. Ferin, Miriam Geiß, Tanja Kupisch and Theo Marinis gave a talk on Rhetorical questions in German-dominant Heritage Speakers of Italian at the Workshop Italian heritage language communities at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Athens, 30th August – 3rd September 2021.
     
  • Qi Yu and Anselm Fliethmann presented their paper entitled Frame detection in German political discourses: How far can we go without large-scale manual corpus annotation? at 1st Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Political Text Analysis taking place on September 6th in Düsseldorf.
     
  • Theo Marinis together with Konstantina Olioumtsevits and Despoina Papadopoulou gave the talk Language skills and educational perspectives of primary school children with a refugee background in Greek formal education on the 7th of September at the International Workshop on Cognitive and/or Linguistic Development of Underrepresented and Disadvantaged Populations organised by the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara.
     
  • Theo Marinis was a discussant at the launch of the Model Language Policy of the European Universities Consortium EPICUR that took place at the University of Amsterdam on Thursday 9th September 2021. The EPICUR Model Language Policy aims at consolidating and promoting linguistic diversity in European higher education, while taking into account the importance of inclusiveness and accessibility of higher education.
     
  • Todor Koev and Cory Bill presented their paper Really: Ambiguity and Question Bias at Sinn und Bedeutung 26, hold online at the University of Cologne on September 8th-10th, 2021.
     
  • On 23rd of September, Henri Kauhanen gave a talk on Momentum selection, distance decay and the fate of linguistic innovations at the 16th Social Simulation Conference of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA), (Warsaw/online).
     
  • There were several presentations at the "Phonetik & Phonologie 17" (29th & 30th September 2021) at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt, online:

    Sophie Kutscheid and Bettina Braun gave a talk on Be careful what you wish for - how German speakers indirectly communicate what they want

    Katharina Zahner-Ritter, Marieke Einfeldt, Daniela Wochner, Angela James, Bettina Braun and Nicole Dehé gave a talk on Testing the distinctive ness of nuclear rising-falling contours in German - Integrating evidence from form and function

    Tianyi Zhao, Marieke Einfeldt, Bettina Braun and Katharina Zahner-Ritter gave a talk on Can Chinese learners of German imitate tonal alignment contrasts in nuclear accents?

    Hendrik Behrens-Zemek and Bettina Braun presented the poster Classification of vowels in infant-directed speech as dialectal vs. non-dialectal

More News

  • 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).
     
  • George Walkden talked about his project Linguistic forecasting at the Volkswagen Foundation’s Forum Originalitätsverdacht at Schloss Herrenhausen, Hanover, 6th-7th September 2021.
     
  • The September edition of "Our Europe today", a virtual event series, organized within ERUA, offered language appetizers for German, French, Greek, Danish and Bulgarian on September 15th, 2021 during the lunchtime event: Multilingualism: Learn the national languages of ERUA.
     
  • Diego Frassinelli (Linguistics) and Caterina Moruzzi (Philosophy) have been funded by the Zukunftskolleg (Transdepartmental Teaching Programme) to offer the advanced seminar titled The Present and Future of AI Research in the SoSe 2022.
     
  • Natasha Korotkova taught the class entitled An opinionated class to the language of opinion (based on joint work with Pranav Anand) at ESSLLI 32, which was hosted virtually by Utrecht University from July 26t to August 13th.

Publications by Members of the Department

  • 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)
     
  • AL-Hassan, M. & Marinis, T. (2021). Sentence Repetition in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Saudi Arabia: An investigation of morpho-syntactic abilities. In: Ntelitheos, Dimitrios and Tommi Tsz-Cheung Leung (Eds.). (2020). „Experimental Arabic Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins“. [Studies in Arabic Linguistics], 143-176.
     
  • Lloyd-Smith, A. (2021). Perceived foreign accent in L3 English: The effects of heritage language use, “International Journal of Multilingualism”, DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2021.1957899.
     
  • Zhang, Y., Ding, R., Frassinelli, D., Tuomainen, J., Klavinskis-whiting, S., & Vigliocco, G. (2021). Electrophysiological signatures of multimodal comprehension in second language. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43.
     
  • Zhang, Y., Frassinelli, D., Tuomainen, J., Skipper, J. I., & Vigliocco, G. (2021). More than words: Word predictability, prosody, gesture and mouth movements in natural language comprehension. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 288(1955).
     
  • Anand, P. and N. Korotkova. 2021. How to theorize about subjective language: A lesson from de re. Linguistics and Philosophy, online first.

Acquisitions of the Library

  • Breakell Fernandez, Leigh: Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children
  • Soare, Gabriela: Why is 'why' unique? its syntactic and semantic properties
  • Denkler, Markus: Dialektologie und Gesprächslinguistik
  • Moser, Ann-Marie: Negationskongruenz in den deutschen Dialekten
  • Kaiser, Livia: Runes across the North Sea from the migration period and beyond: an annotated edition of the Old Frisian Runic Corpus
  • Speyer, Augustin: Syntax aus Saarbrücker Sicht 4: Beiträge der SaRDiS-Tagung zur Dialektsyntax
  • Buridant, Claude: Grammaire du francais médiéval: XIe-XIVe siècles
  • Anikin, Aleksandr E.: Anikin, Aleksandr E.: Russkij ėtimologičeskij slovarʹ ; Vypusk 13, 14 . (dva-digló)
  • Pugliese, Fernanda: Vocabolario polinomico e sociale italiano - arbëresh ; Volume 1 . Teoria e metodo: spazio e relazioni di prossimità
  • Pugliese, Fernanda: Vocabolario polinomico e sociale italiano-croato molisano: lessico dello spazio pubblico Figure dell’autorità, mestieri e lavori : raccolta della memoria orale
  • Körper, Gedächtnis, Literatur in (post-)totalitären Kulturen<Veranstaltung> <2016, Berlin>: Language policies in the light of antidiscrimination and political correctness: und weitere Beiträge
  • Applied linguistics; Volume 41 (2020)
  • Études germaniques; 75e année, no. 1-4 = 297-300 (2020)
  • Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik; Jahrgang 53, Heft 1
  • Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik; Band 87 (2020)
  • Studi di lessicografia italiana; Volume 38 (2021)

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