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Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz

Issue CLXXXI: July 2023

This is the 181st 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 2023 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in June 2023.

Events at/by the Department

Department and Research Colloquium in July

06.07 Maria Polinsky (University of Maryland College Park): Bilinguals’ strategies under indeterminacy in the input
13.07 Benazir Mumtaz (Universität Konstanz): Resolving Prosodic Puzzles in Urdu
20.07 Mariia Esipova (Universität Konstanz): Intentionality and accidentality at the interfaces

Department and Research Colloquium in June

15.06 Fabian Heck (Universität Leipzig): Empty expletives and the EPP
22.06 Emanuel Quadros de Souza (Universität Konstanz): Grammatical theory and variation in an exemplar-driven catergorial grammar
29.06 Carmen Saldana (Universität Zürich): What can Artificial Language Learning experiments tell us about morphological universals?

in July
The 4th edition of the Heritage Language Syntax workshop will take place on July 3rd and 4th at the Kulturzentrum in Konstanz. The complete programme for the workshop can be accessed online. All department members and students are welcome to attend.

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In July

  • Several members of the department will be presenting at the 24th Diachronic Generative Syntax conference in Paris, July 4th-7th.
    * Henri Kauhanen is giving 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 is giving 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 is giving an invited talk with the title Adult language acquisition and change.
     * There are 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 is presenting 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 will give a talk on Modelling exponents: Vocabulary items at this year's LFG conference in Rochester, USA (21st July - 25th July 2023).
     
  • Hyewon Jang will give 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 will also present 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 is: Intended and Perceived Sarcasm between Close Friends: What Triggers Sarcasm and what Gets Conveyed?.
    In Toronto Hyewon Jang will present 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 is: Figurative Language Processing: A Linguistically Informed Feature Analysis of the Behavior of Language Models and Humans.

In June

  • On 2nd June, Molly Rolf gave a talk entitled Case Loss Due To L2-difficulty In The Balkan Sprachbund at HiSoN in Brussels.
     
  • Luisa Geib, Marieke Einfeldt presented a joint work with Katharina Zahner-Ritter (University of Trier) on Prosodic marking of allegedly attractive vs. unattractive objects in child-directed speech at the Phonetics and Phonology of Europe (PaPE) conference, in Nijmegen June 2nd-4th.

    At the same conference, Marieke Einfeldt, Ekaterina Kazak (University of Manchester), Angela James, Rita Sevastjanova, Daniela Wochner, Katharina Zahner-Ritter (University of Trier), Nicole Dehé and Bettina Braun presented their work on The relevance and weighting of prosodic cues in question interpretation.
     
  • Tamara Rathcke was invited to give a plenary talk at the Phonetics & Phonology in Europe conference, on 2nd-4th June at Radboud University in Nijmegen. She presented her work on rhythm.
     
  • Charlotte Englert presented a poster titled Multilingual acquisition of grammatical gender: The role of typological similarity at the University of Edinburgh Linguistics and English Language Postgraduate Conference, June 5th-7th.
     
  • Bettina Braun gave a talk on Development of native listening in light of dialectal variation at the workshop Native Listening: a Canteen of Cutlery – Meeting in Memory of Anne Cutler in Nijmegen June 6th-7th.
     
  • Tamara Rathcke was an invited speaker at the workshop organised by the UK-South Korea Prosody Network, on 20th-22nd June at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul. She presented her work on rhythm.
     
  • Christoph Schwarze gave an invited talk at the Freie Universität Berlin on June 21st on Bare nouns in French - constraints on preposition phrases with bare nouns.
     
  • Svenja Schmid and Laura Hund gave a talk titled Podcasts as spoken language corpora: A resource to improve speech rhythm in the classroom of FLE at the Workshop Spoken language corpora as a teaching-learning resource for French as a foreign language in Orléans from 29th to 30th June.

More News

  • 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).
     
  • In the first 10 days of June, Diego Frassinelli visited the Language and Cognition Lab at UCL.
     
  • On June 19th-21st, Georg Kaiser and Svenja Schmid organized a workshop titled Introduction to digital corpus creation and annotation for all department members and students who are interested. This workshop was taught by Rayan Ziane (Université de Caen Normandie) and included the following topics: digitization of text, document structuring and segmentation, and automated syntax annotation.
     
  • Angelika Golegos joined the research group of Sharon Unsworth (Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University) for one month as part of the Konstanzia MEiN programme (Mentoring with Experts and international Networking).

Publications by Members of the Department

  • 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)
     
  • Eline Smit & Tamara Rathcke, together with Keller, P. E. from the University of Aarhus/Denmark, have published an opinion piece on Tuning the Musical Mind: Next Steps in Solving the Puzzle of the Cognitive Transfer of Musical Training to Language and Back. The piece appeared in the interdisciplinary, open-access journal "Music & Science, 6”. (online access)
     
  • Golegos, A., & Marinis, T. (2023). Pronoun resolution in Greek: Stress is not a cue for disambiguation. “Studies in Greek Linguistics”, 42, 163-172. (online access)

Acquisitions of the Library

  • Löffler, Heinrich: Johann Jakob Spreng und sein Allgemeines deutsches Glossarium
  • Gotthelf, Jeremias: Text
  • Falkenberg, Viola: Wissenschaftskommunikation: vom Hörsaal ins Rampenlicht: mit Übungen und Checklisten
  • Garachana Camarero, Mar: From verbal periphrases to complex predicates
  • Codeluppi, Vanni: Leggere la pubblicità
  • Agresti, Giovanni: Vocabulario polinomio e sociale italiano - romani
  • Language typology and universals; De Gruyter Mouton Volume 75
  • Sprache im technischen Zeitalter; Böhlau 60. Jahrgang, Heft 241-244
  • Voprosy jazykoznanija: East View Information Services : 2022
  • Études germaniques; Klincksieck 77e année, no. 1-4 = 305-308
  • Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik; Steiner Band 89
  • Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik; de Gruyter Band 50
  • Journal of English linguistics; Sage Volume 49
  • Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik; Volume 70
  • Bulletin of Hispanic studies; Liverpool Univ. Press Volume 99
  • The French review; American Association of Teachers of French Volume 95
  • Studi linguistici italiani; Salerno Ed. 3. serie, 26 = volume 47
  • Zeitschrift für romanische Sprachen und ihre Didaktik; Ibidem-Verl. 16

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