Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXII: October 2017

This is the 112th 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 October 2017 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in September 2017.

Kelsey Kraus, a PhD student from the University of California at Santa Cruz, is visiting our Department during part of this winter semester to work on the pragmatics of particles and intonation.

in October

From October 4th to 6th, P4-P7 or FOR2111 are jointly organizing a workshop on Prosody and Meaning (PaM). The program can be found on the workshop website. In addition to talks, all the projects of FOR2111 will present a poster in the poster session.

Workshop "Questioning Speech Acts"
From September 14th to 16th the Workshop on Questioning Speech Acts jointly organized by Project P5 of FOR2111 and the Emmy Noether Group What is it to ask a question? took place at Freiräume, Konstanz. The program can be found on the worksop website.

Summer School
From September 18th to 28th, the University of Konstanz offered a summer school programme on the subject "Multilingualism in Western Europe: France and Spain". The programme was organised by the Departments of Literature and Linguistics at the University of Konstanz together with the German-French University (DFH) and was supported by the Centre IKER / UMR 5478-CNRS (Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour et Université Bordeaux Montaigne) and the Etxepare Basque Institute. The programme was coordinated by Georg A. Kaiser (Department of Linguistics, Konstanz), Ricardo Etxepare (IKER/UMR 5478-CNRS) and Pere Joan Tous (Department of Literature, Konstanz).

Multilingualism Conference
The Center for Multilingualism (directed by Tanja Rinker) organised a one-day international conference on "Multilingualism in kindergarten and schools - common challenges and common paths" that was held at the Kloster Hegne, Hotel St. Elisabeth on September 23rd. The conference was also the official closing event of the two year transfer project "Multilingualism in day care and primary schools", that the Center for Multilingualism carried out in cooperation with the school board in Konstanz, the department for daycare centers of the City of Konstanz as well as the Italian Consulate in Stuttgart/Freiburg. Local, national and international speakers were: Dr. Tanja Rinker, Frank Fuchshuber, Ramona Baumgartner (Universität Konstanz); Evrim Bayram, Julia Sommer (Stadt Konstanz); Prof. Steffi Sachse, Prof. Jens Kratzmann, Beyhan Ertanir (Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg und Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt); Prof. Janet Grijzenhout (Universiteit Leiden); Prof. Julia Festman (Pädagogische Hochschule Tirol), Dr. Vasiliki Chondrogianni (University of Edinburgh); Prof. Claudine Kirsch (Université du Luxembourg). More information can be found on the event website of the Center for Multilingualism.

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

• On October 2nd, Nathalie Czeke and Monika Lindauer will visit Leiden University. Together with Janet Grijzenhout they will join a workshop organized by Claartje Levelt. Nathalie will present "A brief introduction to the Baby Speech Lab Konstanz“ and Monika "Investigations on the acquisition of German by heritage language speaking children“.

• Josef Bayer is invited to give a talk at the Workshop on Case-impoverished Germanic held from 5th to 6th October in Lund. His talk is entitled "Case Deficiency in the Verbal and in the Adpositional Domain".

• George Walkden will give a talk on "V3 in Estonian" (with Virve Vihman, Tartu), at the Workshop on V3 and Resumptive Adverbials, in Gent, Belgium (5th to 6th October).

• From Oktober 8 to 12, the 35. conference of the German association of romanists will take place in Zurich. The following researchers from Konstanz will take part:
  • Simon Dold, Ricardo Etxepare and Georg A. Kaiser will give a talk on "Estructuras extra-románcias en frases interrogativas romances" (’Non-Romance structures in Romance interrogatives’).
• Janina Reinhardt will give a talk on "Intonational variation in French interrogatives exemplified by Reality TV".
• Michael Zimmermann will give a talk entitled "Investigating the setting of the null subject parameter in Early Classical French. Insights from diaries" at the workshop "Morpho-syntax of the Romance languages and their formal analysis" as part of the 35. conference of the German association of romanists.

• On Ocotber 12th George Walkden will give a talk on “Parsing advantage as the determinant of change and stability? Some problems of the variational model of language change” (with Henri Kauhanen), at Triggers of Language Change in the Language Sciences (XLanS) in Lyon, France.

• George Walkden will talk about “The origins of verb-second in Northumbrian Old English”, at the Seminar on Old English Verbs in Logroño, Spain at October 20th.

• Nicole Dehé will be invited plenary speaker at the 48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 48), which takes place in Reykjavík, Iceland, 27-29 October 2017. The title of her talk will be "The prosody of rhetorical questions".

• Marieke Einfeldt, Tanja Kupisch and Mechild Tronnier (University of Lund) gave a talk on "The acquisition of Italian geminates by L1 German and Swedish speakers in production and perception" at the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (4th to 7th September in Chania (Crete), Greece).

• Christin Schätzle presented her work on "Word Order Change, Case and Expletives in the History of Icelandic“ at the 19th Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference (DiGS19) which took place at South Africa's Stellenbosch University from 5th to 8th September.

• George Walkden also presented his work at the DiGS19 in a talk with the title "Early Germanic preposition stranding revisited".

• Doris Penka gave a talk on “The semantics of equatives in English and German” at the Semantic Microvariation workshop taking place on September 6th at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin.

• Andrea Beltrama, Erlinde Meertens and Maribel Romero gave a talk about "Decomposing cornering effects: An Experimental Study" at Sinn und Bedeutung 22 in Berlin (7th to 10th September).

• Andrea Beltrama also presented a poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 22 entitled "Subjective Assertions and Illocution: an Experimental Perspective on Predicates of Personal Taste".

• Clara Huttenlauch, Tina Bögel, and Bettina Braun presented a poster with the title "Speech errors in the L1, triggered by code switches from the L2 " at the AMLaP 2017 which was held from September 7th to 9th in Lancaster, UK.

• On September 12th George Walkden gave a talk on "Exceptions to V2 in Estonian (and Kiezdeutsch)" (with Virve Vihman), at Societas Linguistica Europaea in Zurich, Switzerland.

• Georg Kaiser and Carmen Widera gave a talk on "Das brasilianische Portugiesische im Kontakt mit Nicht-Nullsubjektsprachen. Zwei Fallstudien" ('Brazilian Portuguese in contact with non-null-subject languages. Two case studies’) at the 12. Deutscher Lusitanistentag that was taking place from 13th to 16th September at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

• On September 15th George Walkden presented his work on “Early Germanic preposition stranding revisited”, at the 32nd Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop in Trondheim, Norway.

• Bettina Braun, Maribel Romero and Doris Penka presented a poster (with Anja Arnhold) "On Ladd's (1981) interpretations of High Negation Polar Questions” at the annual meeting of XPrag.de on 18th and 19th September in Cologne.

• Mark-Matthias Zymla presented a paper with the title "Comprehensive annotation of cross-linguistic variation in tense and aspect categories" at the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics from 19th to 22nd September in Montpellier, France.

• George Walkden gave a talk on "Parsing-Entscheidungen im CHLG (Parsing decisions in the Corpus of Historical Low German)" (with Anne Breitbarth and Sheila Watts), at the Workshop on Reference Corpora of German in Rauischholzhausen on September 28th.

• Talina Weber, Muna Schönhuber and Janet Grijzenhout presented a poster on "The prosody of yes/no-questions in German first language acquisition" at the P&P 13: Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin (28th to 29th September).

• Farhat Jabeen and Bettina Braun also presented a poster at the P&P 13 with the title "New information vs. corrective focus: Perception of duration differences in Urdu/Hindi".

• Nathalie Czeke and Monika Lindauer participated in the Drongo Language Festival from September 29th to 30th in Utrecht. Together with other researchers of the AThEME project, they presented research on bilingualism and research methods of the Konstanz BabySpeechLab.

As part of her AFF-supported research on clitics across Iranian languages, Tina Bögel is conducting a two week research visit to Iran at the beginning of October, where she will talk to linguists in Teheran, Shiraz and Bushehr.

On this years Dies Academicus, celebrated on October 20th in the Audimax, Clara Huttenlauch will get awarded with the Dietrich H. Boesken-Preis 2017 for the best M.A. degree at the University of Konstanz. Our warmest congratulations!

• Balcerak Jackson, Brendan & Doris Penka. 2017. Number word constructions, degree semantics and the metaphysics of degrees. Linguistics and Philosophy, 40(4): 347-372. link

• Dörre, Laura, Anna Czypionka, Andreas Trotzke & Josef Bayer. In press. The processing of German modal particles and their counterparts. Linguistische Berichte.

• Kauhanen, Henri & George Walkden. 2017. Deriving the Constant Rate Effect. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. link

• Schlücker, Barbara, Kati Hannken-Illjes & Nicole Dehé. 2017. Zuhören vs. Lesen: Verständnis literarischer Texte bei Schüler_innen (Listening vs. reading: schoolchildren’s comprehension of literary texts). Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 67: 149-177.