Newsletter January 2020

This is the 139th 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 January 2020 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in December 2019.

Events at/by the Department

in January

• At the Ringvorlesung on 7th January at 5pm Dr. Christos Pliatsikas (University of Reading) will present The effects of bilingualism on brain structure. The Ringvorlesung is as usual in R 512.
   
• There will be also an invited talk by Dr. habil Dagmar Bittner (Leibniz ZAS Berlin) who will talk about The use of Pronouns in people with Dementia. This talk is part of the colloquium of Theo Marinis and will take place on Thursday 9th 13.30-15.00 in G 307.
   
• Olga Kellert is giving a talk entitled Syntactic and Prosodic properties of interrogatives in Italian on January 23th at 1.30 pm at the "Multilingualism research colloquium" (room G 307).

in December

• On December 6th, the Departments of Psychology and of Linguistics hosted the annual meeting of cognitive neuroscience, organized by Martin Imhof and Antje Strauß. There were two invited speakers:
  
  - Dr. Søren Andersen (School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen) talked about Dynamics of Selective Visual Attention.
  
  - Prof. Dr. Jonas Obleser (Physiological Psychology and Research Methods, University of Lübeck) talked about Waves of excitement: Twenty years in Auditory Neuroscience.
  
  Afterwards, there was a poster session with the research highlights of both Departments of the last year with a lively joint discussion and a poster prize in the end.
   
• On December 12th Hannah Booth gave a talk on Building a Middle Low German Corpus.
   
• A one-day workshop on LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task took place on the 16th of December. It brought together researchers who are using the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Tasks in one or more languages. It consisted of short (10-15 minute) presentations on methodological issues of the tasks, such as, material selection, administration, scoring, as well as results comparing typically and atypically developing children. There was time for a general discussion on methodological issues and future directions. The workshop was organized by Theo Marinis, Angelika Golegos, Elisabeth Süß, and Kaja Gregorc.
   
• Also Following interesting talks took place on December:
  - Tracy Holloway King (Adobe) on NLP in the Real World.
  - Vered Shwartz on Fast breaking and slow building of textual inference models.

Department and Research Colloquium in January

Department and Research Colloquium in December

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in January

• Together with Kari Kinn (Oslo), George Walkden will be giving a talk on Exploring Norn from a heritage language perspective at the Conference on Medieval English in a Multilingual Context (Cardiff, 6th Jan) and at the Forum for Germanic Language Studies Conference (Bristol, 9th Jan).
   
• Katharina Zahner is giving an invited talk in the linguistics colloquium at the University Duisburg-Essen on Tuesday, January 7th. She will be talking about Early sensitivity to prosody: The perception of intonation in German infants.
   
• Natasha Korotkova is giving an invited talk entitled Find, must, and conflicting evidence at Oberseminar General and Theoretical Linguistics, University of Tübingen, on January 13th.
   
• Marieke Einfeldt is invited to give a presentation on 3L1 acquisition on January 16th at the Developmental Psychology research colloquium at the University of Zurich.
   
• Petr Biskup will give an invited talk on Effects of Prefixation in Slavic languages at the University of Tübingen on January 17th.
   
• Svenja Schmid and Laura González López are giving a talk on Los vocativos en oraciones interrogativas qu- at the XLIX Simposio Internacional de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística, in Tarragona January 21st-24th.
   
• On January 22nd, Tina Bögel will give an invited talk on Frequency effects and prosodic boundary strength at the Phonetics Colloqium at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken.
   
• Svenja Schmid will give a talk at the 28th Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE 28), January 29-31, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. The title is Word order alternations in Italian and Spanish why-interrogatives.

in December

• On December 2nd, Regine Eckardt presented on Extreme Ignorance Questions in German: The case of bloss at ZAS Berlin. The talk was part of the Semantics Circle of ZAS.
   
• George Walkden gave a talk at the Freie Universität Berlin on 3rd December with the title Parataxis and hypotaxis: formal and empirical perspectives.
   
• On December 5th, Petr Biskup gave a talk on Grammaticalization of Prepositions in Slavic at the diachronic workshop Variation and Change in the Verb Phrase at the University of Oslo.
   
• Andreas Trotzke gave an invited talk on Partikelsyntax im Sprachvergleich at the University of Düsseldorf on December 10th.
   
• Erlinde Meertens gave a talk titled How prosody disambiguates between Alternative and Polar Questions at Amsterdam Colloquium, December 18th-20st.

More News

The proposed workshop with the title “Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning” (program committee: Lasha Abzianidze, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Thomas Icard, Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Larry Mos and Hitomi Yanaka) was accepted at NASSLLI 2020, taking place at the Brandeis University (MA-US) from July 12th to July 17th. The workshop will feature talks by invited speakers and other presentation sessions. There will soon be a call for contributions. Stay tuned!

In the recent collaborative funding opportunity of the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) 19 projects across all disciplines were awarded. We will soon start with the project entitled Complexity in Derivational Morphology: Theory and Experimental Evidence (UK PI Aditi Lahiri; German PI Carsten Eulitz).

It is a pleasure for us to announce the appearance of Arbeitspapier Nr. 130 of the Department of Linguistics. The issue contains the Proceedings of the Workshop "Clause Typing and the Syntax-to-Discourse Relation in Head-Final Languages" that was held at Schloss Freudental in spring 2018. Josef Bayer & Yvonne Viesel.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Dehé, Nicole. 2019. 'Minimal adaptation' and the edges of prosodic domains. "Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism" 9(6): 833-837.
   
• Kaiser, Georg A., Klaus von Heusinger & Svenja Schmid. 2019. Word order variation in Spanish and Italian interrogatives. The role of the subject in ‘why’-interrogatives. In: N. Pomino (ed.), Proceedings of the IX Nereus International Workshop: “Morphosyntactic and semantic aspects of the DP in Romance and beyond”. Konstanz: Fachbereich Linguistik, Universität Konstanz (= Arbeitspapier 131), 69-90.
   
• Bayer, Josef. 2019. Why doubling discourse particles? in: Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation, eds. Ludovico Franco & Paolo Lorusso. De Gruyter. Berlin. Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG] 132
   
• Quaglia, S., Kupisch, T. & Lloyd-Smith, A. (2019). Competing Factors in the Acceptability of Italian Embedded Wh-questions. In R. Slabakova, J. Corbet, L. Dominguez, A. Dudley, & A. Wallington (Eds.), “Explorations in Second Language Acquisition and Processing” (pp. 208-220). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
   
• The proceedings of the TripleA 5 workshop held in June 2018 in Konstanz, and organized by Ryan Bochnak, Miriam Butt, Erlinde Meertens, and Mark-Matthias Zymla, are now available open access via the University of Tübingen library.
   
• Walkden, George, & Anne Breitbarth. 2019. Complexity as L2-difficulty: implications for syntactic change.Theoretical Linguistics 45(3-4), 183-209.
   
• Trotzke, Andreas. 2019. Approaching the pragmatics of exclamations experimentally. “Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society” 54 (CLS 54), 527-540.
   
• Trotzke, Andreas. 2019. How cool is that! Ein neuer Sprechakt aus Sicht der Grammatik/Pragmatik-Schnittstelle. In Simon Meier-Vieracker, Lars Bülow, Frank Liedtke, Konstanze Marx & Robert Mroczynski (eds.), „50 Jahre Speech Acts: Bilanz und Perspektiven“, 249-268. Tübingen: Narr.

Acquisitions of the Library

• Lenker, Ursula: Anglo-Saxon micro-texts
• Behnstedt, Peter: Atlas of the Arabic dialects of Galilee (Israel)
• Huehnergard, John: Semitic languages
• Bešenkova, Elena V.: Aspektnoe opisanie russkoj orfografii
• Kozinec, Sergej Borisovič: Slovarʹ okkazionalizmov russkogo jazyka
• Milovanova, Marija Stanislavovna: Ėkspressija russkogo otricanija
• Mišankina, Natalja Aleksandrovna: Russkie terminosistemy v aspekte semantičeskoj izbiratel'nosti
• Ramallo, Fernando: Neohablantes de lenguas minorizadas en el Estado español
• Pustka, Elissa: Emotionen, Expressivität, Emphase
• Liu, Weiyue: Distribution of dual number
• Baker, Mark C.: Case: its principles and its parameters
• Gutzmann, Daniel: Semantik
• Duffield, Nigel: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Vietnamese linguistics
• Ismajli, Blertë: Deutsch-albanische Modusfeld als Übersetzungsproblem
• Approches théoriques et empiriques en phraséologie - Theorie und Empirie in der Phraseologie <2014, Nancy>
• Architecture of Topic <2014, Lund>
• Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik; Band 85 (2018)
• Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik; 70 (2019)
• Iberoromania; Número 90 (2019)
• Italienisch; 11.1989 = Nr. 21 und Nr. 22
• Revista de filología española; volumen 96 (2016), 97 (2017), 98 (2018)
• Balkansko ezikoznanie; 57

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