Newsletter May 2021

This is the 155th 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 May 2021 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in April 2021.

New to Konstanz

Slavic linguistics in Konstanz welcomes a new member. However, some of you will already know Malinka Pila as she has already worked in Konstanz in a DFG-funded project on verbal aspect in West and South Slavic minority language islands. She now holds the Post-doc position and continues to work on her habilitation thesis which is dedicated to a contact-linguistic investigation of Resian, a Slovenian minority language spoken in Northern Italy.

We welcome Dr Alexander Pfaff, who this semester is teaching an Introduction to Old Norse/Icelandic and an MA course on the morphology-syntax interface.

Leaving Konstanz

We congratulate Katerina Kalouli on the successful completion of her dissertation Hy-NLI: A Hybrid system for state-of-the-art Natural Language Inference this past March and on her new position as Akademische Rätin at the LMU in Hinrich Schütze's research group, starting August 1st, 2021. We wish Katerina Kalouli all the best in this new post-doctoral position, while we spend our time figuring out how to move forward without the many energetic contributions she has made to the FOR 2111 and to our department on so many levels.

Events at/by the Department

• The 22nd Diachronic Generative Syntax conference (DIGS) will be taking place at Konstanz (virtually) from 19th-22nd May 2021, along with a workshop on Syntactic Change in Progress. Please see the programme here.
  
  Following department's members will take part in the DiGS:

1. Carmen Widera is giving a talk entitled The use of impersonal il in modern spoken French: a micro-diachronic analysis at the workshop Syntactic Change in Progress (SCiP) on May 19th.
2. Miriam Butt and Christin Beck will present their joint work with Ashwini Deo (Ohio State University) on Tracking Case Innovation: A Perspective from Marathi on May 21st.
3. On Friday 21st May Hannah Booth and Christin Beck will give a talk Information structure and word order change: verb-first and verb-second in Icelandic.

• The lecture series The Multilingual Mind started again on the 13th April and will run until June 2021. The lectures will take place every Tuesday from 17.00 until 18.30 (CEST/UTC+02). Please visit the MultiMind website for more information.

Department and Research Colloquium in May

Department and Research Colloquium in April

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in May

• Theo Marinis will give an invited talk at the Fachtag Grundbildung „Vom Projekt zum Programm: Nachhaltige Wege zur Förderung der Literalität in der Familie“ on Tuesday 4th May 2021 on the topic Die Bedeutung der Literalität in mehrsprachigen Familien. The program and registration information can be found here.
   
• Daniela Wochner is giving an invited talk at the University of Leipzig, Institut für Germanistik, on the 4th of May.
   
• Maria Biezma, Bettina Braun, and Angela James will present a poster entitled Prosody is adding what? at the digital conference Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 31, May 7th-9th 2021, at Brown University.
   
• Kajsa Djärv will give a talk at SALT31 Composing attitude reports: why knowing people is not believing them.
   
• Kajsa Djärv & Maribel Romero will present a poster at SALT31 (Non-)factive islands from (non-)necessary triviality.
   
• On May 19th, Tina Bögel will give an invited talk on The prosody of Swabian pronouns: strong and weak forms at the interfaces at the roundtable on the prosody of function words at the Unversity of Frankfurt.
   
• Kajsa Djärv will give an invited talk at The Edinburgh University Meaning and Grammar Research Group: TBD.

in April

• Josef Bayer was an invited speaker in the Syracuse/Cornell Workshop on Word Order and Scrambling (Co-)Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Linguistic Studies Program, Syracuse University. The title of his talk was Particles as functional heads: Recycling in the syntax of wh-questions.
   
• Kajsa Djärv: gave an invited talk at the OSU Workshop on Clause-Embedding Predicates: Knowing and believing things: what DP-complementation can tell us about the argument structure and semantic composition of attitude verbs.
  She also took part in the conference WCCFL39 with the talk Composing attitude reports: why knowing people is not believing them.
   
• Monika Lindauer gave an invited talk about Research methods in the BabySpeechLab Konstanz at the Kath. Stiftungshochschule München on April 19th.
   
•  Natasha Korotkova gave two invited talks in April, at the UMass Amherst Semantics workshop on the 16th and at the Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Stuttgart on the 27th.
   
• Anamaria Bentea gave a talk at the University of Geneva on 29th April entitled: Effects of Pronoun Type on Relative Clause Comprehension.
   
• George Walkden gave a talk on 30th April at the Stony Brook Virtual Linguistics Colloquium with the title The diachrony of parataxis and hypotaxis.

More News

• May marks the beginning of the joint German-Russian research project "Russian in Germany Across Generations" (RuGGe). The German team is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Russian team from the Russian Department of St. Petersburg State University is supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF). The project investigates language transmission and change among three different generations of speakers of Russian in Germany: (a) grandparents who immigrated as adults to Germany, (b) their children who came as adolescents to Germany and (c) their children who were already born in Germany and can thus be considered classical heritage speakers of Russian. All three groups therefore represent different profiles with regard to their bilingual language acquisition. The expected results of the project will contribute to our theoretical understanding about first language attrition in immigration settings and the role of quality of input for heritage language acquisition. Another innovative feature of the project is that we adopt a holistic approach by including properties from several linguistic levels (phonetics and phonology, prosody, inflectional morphology, morphosyntax, syntax and lexicon). This design will allow us to check (a) for the (differing) degree of vulnerability of the investigated properties considering attrition processes and language change and (b) the importance of quality of parental input on language acquisition by the subsequent generation of speakers of Russian as a minority language depending on the investigated linguistic property.
  
  The project is scheduled for three years. The team in Konstanz consists of the project leader Bernhard Brehmer, the Post-doc student Tatjana Kurbangulova and the PhD student Olia Blacher. Tatjana joins us from the University of Greifswald, Olia from the University of Jena. Please give them a warm welcome!
   
• The submission ‘Kindergarten’ versus ‘Gartenkinder’: EEG-evidence on the effects of familiarity and semantic transparency on German compounds written by Carsten Eulitz and Eva Smolka has been accepted for presentation at CogSci 2021 in Vienna.
   
• Josef Bayer is invited by the Japanische Gesellschaft für Germanistik to present a series of six lectures in Kyoto and other Japanese cities in August/September 2021.
   
• Prerna Nadathur will be starting a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Zukunftskolleg and joining the Department of Linguistics on 1st July 2021. She completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at Stanford in 2019, and has since held research and teaching positions at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests are in semantics and pragmatics, including (quantified) conditionals, exceptive constructions, and causative verbs. Her most recent work centers on causal meaning, and in particular on how the representation and distribution of causal meaning at the lexical level drives inferential patterns that emerge at the sentential level, and in compositional interactions with modality and aspect.
   
• Ramona Baumgartner is an invited speaker in a series of Online-Workshops about supportive measures for literacy development in early childhood and primary school for educators, teachers and parents. Original title: Familiy Literacy in der Grundbildung: Ein Workshop zur Förderung der Lese- und Schreibfähigkeiten von Kindergarten- und Grundschulkindern und möglicher Unterstützungsangebote für Eltern. The next workshop in the series will take place on Thursday, 20th May 6-7.45 pm, information and registration here.
   
• Ramona Baumgartner from the Centre for Multilingualism is now part of the coordination team of the European Reform Universities Alliance (ERUA). She started in March and will be the contact person for the faculty of humanities within the University of Konstanz. She is also working on the sub-group multilingualism together with Theo Marinis and ERUA partners. The first ERUA-calls are out, please check the ERUA-website and get in touch with Ramona Baumgartner for any questions and ideas.
   
• The department and the Centre for Multilingualism are cooperating with the vhs Grundbildungszentrum on literacy development within the family. In this context all the cooperation partners were interviewed by Kirsten Astor from the Südkurier. You can read the complete interview here.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Brehmer, Bernhard & Aldona Sopata. 2021. Word order in complex verb phrases in heritage Polish spoken in Germany. "Languages 6(2)", 70. (online access)
   
• Długosz, Kamil, Aldona Sopata, Bernhard Brehmer & Raina Gielge. 2021. Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential acquisition: Null subjects and null objects in Polish-German bilingualism. "International Journal of Bilingualism", March 2021. (online access)
   
• Brehmer, Bernhard. 2021. Slavic heritage languages around the globe. In: S. Montrul & M. Polinsky (eds.): "The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13–44.
   
• Alencar, Leonel Figueiredo de and Christoph Schwarze. 2021. French de and en as expressions of the genitive case: a unified analysis within LFG and computational implementation in “XLE. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 37(1)” (online access).
   
• Bentea, A. and Marinis, T. (2021) Not all wh-dependencies are created equal: processing of multiple wh-dependencies in Romanian children and adults. Applied Psycholinguistics.(online access)
   
• Rehn, Alexandra. 2021. Loss, optionality and variation. Three case studies. In Kranich, Svenja & Brebant, Tine (eds.) “Lost in change. Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions”. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
   
• Sarveswaran, K., Dias, G. & Butt, M. ThamizhiMorph: A morphological parser for the Tamil language. Machine Translation (2021). (online access)

Acquisitions of the Library

• Eco, Umberto: Einführung in die Semiotik
• Fasold, Ralph W.: An introduction to language and linguistics
• Dittmann, Jürgen: Der Spracherwerb des Kindes: Verlauf und Störungen
• Gutzmann, Daniel: Use-conditional meaning: studies in multidimensional semantics
• Hartmann, Peter: Das Wort als Name: Struktur, Konstitution und Leistung der benennenden Bestimmung
• Schiefner, Anton: Der Linguist Anton Schiefner (1817–1879) und sein Netzwerk: Briefe an Emil Schlagintweit, Leo Reinisch, Franz v. Miklosich, Vatroslav Jagić, K. S. Veselovskij, Eduard Pabst, Vilhelm Thomsen und andere.
• Eckhardt, Oscar: Alemannisch in der Rumantschia: die alemannischen Dialekte im romanischen Sprachraum von Trin, Ilanz, Trun und Scuol : eine Publikation des Instituts für Kulturforschung Graubünden
• Bonan, Caterina: Romance interrogative syntax: formal and typological dimensions of variation
• Wiesinger, Evelyn: Le syntagme nominal en créole guyanais: une étude synchronique et diachronique du marqueur LA
• Mondon, Jean-Francois R.: Cymraec Canawl: an Introduction to Middle Welsh
• Vergeiner, Philip C.: Bewertungen – Erwartungen – Gebrauch: Sprachgebrauchsnormen zur inneren Mehrsprachigkeit an der Universität.
• Ramos, Jânia M.: Dialetação e povoamento: da história linguística à história social
• Revista internacional de lingu͏̈ística iberoamericana; volumen 17,1 = N°1 (33) - 18,2 = N°2 (36)
• Suvremena lingvistika; Godina 46, Svezak 2 = Broj 90
• Journal of Chinese linguistics; Volume 48 (2020)

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