Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CIX: July 2017

This is the 109th 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 2017 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in June 2017.

Irene Heim (MIT) will be visiting the department from July 19th to 21st.

Constantin Freitag will move to Köln. From August 1st he will be member of the chair of Sophie Repp. We wish him all the best for the future!

in July

On July 6, our former PhD student Ariel Gutmann will be awarded the Konstanz price for the best dissertation of the year 2016. His thesis is on "Attrubutive Constructions in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic: Typological and Historical Perspectives". Our warm congratulations!

Miriam Butt is organizing a 3-day workshop titled "Text-to-speech for Urdu: Understanding intonation". The workshop will be held from 11th to 13th July in G119. There will be talks on syntax and intonation by the team of linguists visiting from Pakistan as well as Jana Neitsch, Sebastian Lory, Mark Zymla, and Christine Schaetzle from Konstanz. Those who are interested are welcome to attend the workshop.

Polina Drozdova (Radboud University Nijmegen) will be giving a talk with the title "Investigating perceptual learning in (non)native speech perception” on July 19th at 13:30 in D301.

On July 28th at 10:00 Andreas Walker will be defending his PhD Thesis on "The world is not enough: situations, laws and assignments in counterfactual donkey sentences" (Room G420).

The 22nd International Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) Conference will take place at the Brigantinus in Konstanz from 25-28th of July and is organized by members of our local linguistics department (Miriam Butt, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Tina Bögel, Sebastian Lory, Christin Schätzle, Stefano Quaglia, Jessica Zipf and Katerina Kalouli) this year. Invited speakers are Geoffrey K. Pullum (University of Edinburgh) who will talk about "The syntactic theory we all really want: some desiderata" on July 26th and Peter Sells (University of York) who will give a talk about "C-structure heads and the limits of head mobility" on July 25th. Moreover, there will be a workshop on prominence-based agreement during the conference, organized by Alex Alsina, and on July 28th, Miriam Butt will give an XLE Tutorial. For the full program, click here.

Several members of the linguistics departments will present their work at the LFG conference:

• Miriam Butt, Tina Bögel and Farhat Jabeen will give a talk on "Polar kya and the Prosody-Syntax-Pragmatics Interface".

• Miriam Butt and Christin Schätzle moreover will present their work on "Dative Subjects and the Rise of Positional Licensing in Icelandic" together with Kersti Börjars and Hannah Booth from the University of Manchester.

• Mark-Matthias Zymla and Sebastian Sulger will talk about "Cross-Linguistically Viable Treatment of Tense & Aspect in Parallel Grammar Development".

• Jessica Zipf and Stefano Quaglia will give a poster presentation on "`Bare' wh-items vs. why in Italian“.

On June 1st Stefanie Jannedy (ZAS Berlin) gave a talk with the title "Sprache, Identität & Einstellung".

On June 30st the final event of the further education series by the transfer platform "Mehrsprachigkeit in Kita und Schule" took place in the Wolkensteinsaal of the cultural center Konstanz .

• Farhat Jabeen and Bettina Braun will present a poster on "What's in duration? Perception of narrow & corrective focus in Urdu/Hindi" at the Linguistics Society of America summer institute which is held from Juli 5th to August 1st in Lexington, Kentucky.

• Henri Kauhanen is giving a talk with the title “Spatial distributions of linguistic features are determined by the interaction of endogenous and exogenous dynamics” at the 3rd International Conference on Computational Social Science in Cologne, July 10th-13th. The talk is joint work with Deepthi Gopal and Tobias Galla from the University of Manchester.

• Katharina Zahner, Muna Schönhuber, Janet Grijzenhout and Bettina Braun will be giving a talk in a symposium on "Song and Prosody for Early Language Acquisition“ at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) that takes place in Lyon from July 14th to 21st. The title of their presentation is "When high pitch matters most: Evidence for a pitch-driven segmentation mechanism“. The symposium is organized by Tineke Snijders (Radboud University).

• Christin Schätzle will give a talk on "Design Space for Diachronic Linguistic Visualizations in Theory and Practice" at the conference Visualisierungsprozesse in den Humanities taking place at the University of Zürich, Switzerland from 17th to 19th July.

• Anna-Maria Waibel from the Neurolinguistics group and Stefan Spiteri from the Schmieder Clinic will give a joint talk on an improved paradigm for N400 elicitation in apallic patients on 25th July at the research colloquium of the Lurija Institute in Allensbach.

• Anna Czypionka gave a talk at the workshop Jenom (Journées d`Etudes sur les Nominalisations) 7 (June 1st and 2nd, Fribourg, Switzerland) entitled “Can deverbal nominalizations be more verbal than finite verbs? New evidence from EEG recordings” which was joint work with Joanna Blaszczak and Dorota Klimek-Jankowska from the University of Wrocław.

• Josef Bayer was invited to give a talk on “Discourse Particles from a Comparative View” at the Syntax-Semantics Workshop in Nantes, France (June 2nd).

• On June 2nd Georg A. Kaiser was giving a talk about "Wortstellung und Wortstellungsvariation im Rätoromanischen" at the VII. Colloquium Retoromanistich (San Martin de Tor, Südtirol/Italien).

• Mark-Matthias Zymla held a presentation on “Annotating cross-linguistic variation of tense and aspect systems“ at the workshop The semantics of verbal morphology in under-described languages (June 2nd to 3rd in in Göteburg, Sweden).

• Maribel Romero was invited speaker at the Philosophy Meets Linguistics workshop (June 5th to 7th, Zürich, Switzerland). She gave a talk with the title “On reverse readings of 'many'”.

• Janina Reinhardt presented her work on "La transmission du manque d’information dans la téléréalité française " (Transmission of information gaps in French reality TV) at the Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs (Meeting of junior researchers in French linguistics) which took place from June 8th to 9th in Paris, France.

• Ryan Bochnak gave a talk entitled "Deriving the readings of Wolof imperfective di" (co-authored with Martina Martinovic, Leipzig), at the workshop on Semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian Languages (TripleA 4), held at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, on June 9th to 11th. From the workshop website: "TripleA aims at providing a forum for semanticists doing fieldwork on understudied languages. Its focus is on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania." He also volunteered to host TripleA 5 here in Konstanz next year, so look out for more information in the coming months.

• Researchers from Konstanz presenting at Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) 2017 (June 12th to 14th in Cologne):
  • Bettina Braun as invited speaker. Her talk was entitled “Pitch accent type affects stress perception: Evidence from infant and adult speech processing”.
• Sophie Egger, María Biezma and Bettina Braun presented a poster about “On the realization of bouletic bias in German questions”.
• Farhat Jabeen had a poster with the topic “Position vs. Prosody: Focus Realization in Urdu and Hindi”.
• Marianne Kusterer, Jana Neitsch, Bettina Braun and Nicole Dehé with a poster about “Interpreting Rhetorical Questions: the Influence of Pitch Accent Type, Voice Quality and the Modal Particle ‘denn’”.
• Jana Neitsch, Daniela Wochner, Katharina Zahner and Nicole Dehe gave a talk with the title “Who likes liver? How German speakers use prosody to mark questions as rhetorical”.
• Daniela Wochner and Nicole Dehé presented a poster about “The prosody of verb-first constructions in German: A comparison of informationseeking questions, rhetorical questions and exclamatives”.
• Katharina Zahner, Heather Kember, Anne Cutler and Bettina Braun had a poster about “Museum or musical? – Pitch accent type affects word recognition in Australian English”

• Researchers from Konstanz presenting at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) (June 11th to 15th in Limerick, Ireland):
  • Anika Lloyd-Smith, Tanja Kupisch and Stefano Quaglia gave a talk about "Italian-German bilinguals acquiring L3 English: Language dominance as a predictor for syntactic transfer".
• Ramona Baumgartner (with Frank Fuchshuber, Janet Grizenhout and Tanja Rinker) presented work on "Maintaining multilingualism in early childhood from kindergarten to primary school".
• Tanja Rinker (with Valerie Shafer, Yan Yu and Monica Wagner). She gave a talk with the title "Neural indices of speech perception in bilingual Spanish-English and Turkish-German children“.
• Furthermore, Tanja Rinker chaired the colloquium „Multilingually developing Turkish children in Europe: Interdisciplinary studies and perspectives“.

• Ricardo Etxepare (IKER UMR5478, Bayonne, currently University of Konstanz) and Georg A. Kaiser participated in a “Sprachwissenschaftlichen Party" in celebration of the 250th birthday of Wilhelm von Humboldt on June 19th at Freien Universität Berlin. They gave a talk on “Typological issus in Basque morpho-syntax”.

• Researchers from Konstanz presenting at the XPrag 2017 conference (June 21st to 23rd in Cologne):
  • Andrea Beltrama gave a talk about “Subjective assertions are weak: an experimental study on perspective-dependent meaning”.
• Sophie Egger, Bettina Braun and Nicole Dehé presented a poster with the title “The realization of bouletic bias: Evidence from German questions”.
• Erlinde Meertens, Andrea Beltrama and Maribel Romero had a poster about "Polar Questions, "or not" Alternative Questions and Complement Alternative Questions: an experimental study”.

• Ramona Baumgartner, Frank Fuchshuber and Monika Lindauer attended the 4th network meeting of the Netzwerk Sprache on the topic "Mehrsprachigkeit wertschätzen: Sprachbildung und Erziehungspartnerschaft mit den Familien" at the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung in Stuttgart on June 27th.

• Gisela Grohne and Regine Eckardt talked about "Embedded questions" and "Self-addressed questions in discourse" at the workshop Inquisitveness below and above the sentence boundary (organised by Floris Roelofson, Amsterdam) from June 26th to 29th in in Broek in Waterland.

• Henri Kauhanen, Caroline Heycock and Joel C. Wallenberg gave a talk on "Grammar competition in neutral learning: A reply to Han et al. (2016)", at the 4th Formal Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (FWAV4), in York, UK from June 29th to 30th.

Monika Lindauer will attend the summer school "Heritage Languages: Theories, Domains and Methodologies" taking place in Roscoff from July 3rd to 7th.

We congratulate Jana Neitsch who won the ALP Student Award for the best oral presentation at Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) 2017.

The DGfS workshop proposal of Ljudmila Geist on "Possessive relations: interpretation, syntax and argument structure" is accepted. She will organize this workshop together with Daniel Jacob (University of Freiburg) and Ilja Seržant (University of Leipzig) at the Annual Meeting of the DGfS, March 7th to 9th 2018, at the University of Stuttgart.

• Walkden, George. 2017. Diagnosing embedded V2 in Old English and Old French (with Christine Meklenborg Salvesen). In Eric Mathieu & Rob Truswell (eds.), Micro-change and macro-change in diachronic syntax, 168-181. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Walkden, George. 2017. The actuation problem. In Adam Ledgeway & Ian Roberts (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, 403-424. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.