Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXIII: November 2017

This is the 113th 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 November 2017 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in October 2017.

Overall three new PhD students have arrived at Konstanz. Working with George Walkden: Tian Li, who will be looking at the diachronic development of Chinese topic marking, and Espen Klævik-Pettersen, a visiting PhD student from the University of Oslo who is here this semester to work on the origins of verb-second in Germanic. And working with Miriam Butt: Saira Bano who investigates the phonology of Dari, an Iranian language. We welcome them all to Konstanz!

in Novemver

t.b.a.

From October 4th to 6th, P4-P7 of FOR2111 jointly organized 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 presented a poster in the poster session.

• On 1st November, George Walkden will be giving a talk on "Preposition stranding in Early West Germanic" at the linguistics colloquium of the University of Göttingen.

• Andrea Beltrama will give a talk on "The social meaning of semantic properties. From markedness to discourse." (with Laura Staum Casasanto) at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 46 in Madison, Wisconsin (2nd to 5th November).

• Carsten Eulitz and Eva Smolka will give a talk on "The brain differentiates between known and unknown word compositions but not between transparent and opaque meaning composition: ERP-evidence from the processing of German nominal compounds and pseudo-compounds" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the neurobiology of language (SNL) taking place in Baltimore, Maryland from November 8th to 10th.

• Ryan Bochnak will be presenting with co-author Emily Hanink (University of Chicago) at Selection Fest on November 10th to 11th at the Leibniz-Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin. The title of their talk is "Selection and complement clause size in Washo."

• Monika Lindauer will attend the Bilingualism Matters/ AThEME Dissemination Network meeting from November 15th to 17th in Barcelona, Spain. She will present her research within the AThEME project about "The acquisition of German by heritage language speaking children". She will also participate in a video project, where AThEME researchers give a short explanation of their work.

• Miriam Butt will give a talk on "Urdu/Hindi Questions at the Syntax-Pragmatics-Prosody Interface" at the Linguistics Circle at the University of Edinburgh on November 16th.

• On November 23rd, Andrea Beltrama will give a talk with the title "Like, hedging and mirativity. A unified account" (with Emily Hanink) at Colloque de Syntaxe and Semantique a Paris (CSSP) in Paris, France.

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

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

• George Walkden gave 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 8th to 12th, the 35. conference of the German association of romanists took place in Zurich. The following researchers from Konstanz took part:
  • Simon Dold, Ricardo Etxepare and Georg A. Kaiser gave a talk on "Estructuras extra-románcias en frases interrogativas romances" (’Non-Romance structures in Romance interrogatives’).
• Janina Reinhardt gave a talk on "Intonational variation in French interrogatives exemplified by Reality TV".
• Michael Zimmermann gave 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 gave 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.

• On October 19th, Georg A. Kaiser was invited to give a talk at the University Bordeaux Montaigne in the Séminaire de CLLE-ERSSàB (UMR5263). His talk was entitled “Contact de langues et conflit linguistique en Europe Occidentale”.

• George Walkden talked 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 was invited plenary speaker at the 48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 48), which took place in Reykjavík, Iceland, 27th to 29th October. The title of her talk was "The prosody of rhetorical questions".

Maribel Romero acts as external evaluator in the defense of the the Ph.D. thesis "The Discourse Semantics of Long-Distance Reflexives" by Per Erik Solberg at the University of Oslo (November 13th to 14th).

Miriam Butt, Daniel Keim and Katharina Holzinger have been granted a new DFG project. It is part of the priority program "Robust Argumentation Machines (RATIO)" and is called "Visual Analytics and Linguistics for Interpreting Deliberative Argumentation (VALIDA)". Our warmest congratulations!

Annette Hautli-Janisz was part of the Argument Analytics Team that the Centre for Argument Technology at the University of Dundee, Scotland, assembled in order to to deliver a suite of argument technology to be piloted in conjunction with BBC programming: a special edition of the Moral Maze on the BBC Radio 4 broadcast at 8pm on 11th October and repeated on 14th October and a one-off TV debate hosted by Anne Robinson, broadcasted at 9pm on Monday 16th October on BBC2. bbc.arg.tech gives more information on the project, for a look behind the scenes go here.

Workshop on "Clause Typing and the Syntax-to-Discourse Relation in Head-Final Languages" at Schloss Freudental from 15th to 17th May 2018! Josef Bayer and Yvonne Viesel welcome your submissions until November 30 via EasyChair For more information see the workshop website.

• Zimmermann, Michael. 2017. Changes in status and paradigms? On subject pronouns in Medieval French. Transactions of the Philological Society, 1-19. link