Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz


Issue CXIV: December 2017


Universitaet Konstanz


Topics of this issue:


This is the 114th 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 December 2017 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in November 2017.


Leaving Konstanz

By the end of this year, Janina Reinhardt is leaving Constance for starting her teacher training (Referendariat) in St. Georgen. We wish her all the best!


Events at the Department

in December

The 2nd Annual Cognitive Neuroscience Meeting, organized by the CogNeu Group (several groups of the Psychology Department and the Neurolingustics group of the Linguistics Department), will be held on December 15th from 9:45-18:00h in G302/G421. The invited speakers are Dr. Alexis Hervais-Adelmann (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, giving a talk "Language and the motor system") and Dr. Ralf Schmälzle (the Department of Communication, Michigan State University, giving a talk "From neurons to nations: Neuroimaging of communication"). All those interested are cordially invited. For more information please contact: mariya.kharaman@uni-konstanz.de



Department and Research Colloquium in December

14.12.Mark-Matthias Zymla & Laura Dörre: PhD-Thesis Presentation
21.12.Christin Schätzle & Constantin Freitag: PhD-Thesis Presentation

Department and Research Colloquium in November

02.11.Fernanda Barrientos (University of Konstanz): On the phonological nature of perceptual categories in L2: (non)acquisition of the /ɑ/ - /ʌ/ contrast by L2 speakers of English with Spanish as L1
09.11.Mihaela Pirvulescu (University of Toronto / University of Toronto at Mississauga): Object omission in child language: implications for monolingual and bilingual acquisition
16.11.Nadine Theiler (University of Amsterdam): Particle 'denn' in Questions
23.11.Matthijs Westera (University of Amsterdam): The pragmatics and prosody of declarative 'questions' and interrogative questions
30.11.Gary Thoms (University of Glasgow): The 'amn't' gap and syntactic variation.

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in December
  • Simon Dold and Georg A. Kaiser will participate in a Workshop on Linguistic Variation in the Basque Country at the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma de Mallorca on December 4th. Simon Dold will present a paper on “Basque-Spanish language contact – interrogative structures in comparison” and Georg A. Kaiser will give a talk together with Alazne Arroirtua (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea / Universidad del País Vasco, Vitoria-Gasteiz) on "Differential object marking in Basque. The case of ditransitive constructions”.
  • Ramona Wallner will be presenting a poster with the title "French wh-in-situ questions have to be prosodically minimal, not given" at the 31st Going Romance from 7th to 9th December in Bucharest, Romania.
  • Several researchers from Konstanz will present their work at the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, held from 20th to 22nd December in Amsterdam, the Netherlands:
    • Eva Csipak: "Referentially used definite descriptions can be conditionalized"
    • David Krassnig: "Sobel and Lewis Sequences – Relevancy or Imprecision?"
    • Sven Lauer: "'I believe' in a ranking-theoretic analysis of 'believe'"
    • Maribel Romero: "Tense and Mood in Counterfactual Conditionals: The View from Spanish"

in November
  • On 1st November, George Walkden gave a talk on "Preposition stranding in Early West Germanic" at the linguistics colloquium of the University of Göttingen.
  • Andrea Beltrama gave 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).
  • On November 7th Marieke Einfeldt gave a talk in the "Language Acquistion Seminar" at Lund University. Her talk was entitled "Phonological development in trilingual language acquisition".
  • Carsten Eulitz and Eva Smolka gave 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) which took place in Baltimore, Maryland from November 8th to 10th.
  • Ryan Bochnak presented 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 was "Selection and complement clause size in Washo."
  • From November 16th to 17th, the L2PHROL - L2 Phonetics and phonology of L1 Romance Learners took place in Turin. Marieke Einfeldt, Tanja Kupisch, Anika Lloyd-Smith und Stefano Quaglia gave a talk on "Foreign accent in Italian-German bilinguals: Comparing Italian influence into German in simultaneous and sequential acquisiton".
  • Miriam Butt gave a talk on "Urdu/Hindi Questions at the Syntax-Pragmatics-Prosody Interface" at the Linguistics Circle at the University of Edinburgh on November 16th.
  • Regine Eckardt presented at the Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris as one of three invited speakers on November 23, 2017. Her talk was about evidentials and deliberative questions.
  • On November 30th Dorota Klimek-Jankowska, Anna Czypionka, Joanna Błaszczak and Wojciech Witkowski gave a talk "On the processing of grammatical aspect in Polish: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments" at the Expert meeting 2 of the project "Time in Translation: the semantics of the PERFECT" in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Travelling

At the moment, Katharina Zahner is visiting Prof. Anne Cutler at the MARCS Institute (Western Sydney University). This 8-week-research stay was funded by the MEiN mentoring program by the University of Konstanz. Katharina is working on a project that investigates the processing of a prosody from a cross-linguistic perspective within the collaboration between the MARCS Institute and SpeechNet BaWü. She will be presenting outcomes of this project and related work in a meeting of the Speech and Language Group (December 4th). She also gave a talk at Macquarie University (Katherine Demuth’s & Titia Benders’ Child Language Lab, December 1st) on the effect of pitch accent type on stress perception in German infants.

Miriam Butt will travel to SOAS, London on December 10th to 11th to act as a consultant for the AHRC funded project "Lexicography in Motion: A History of the Tibetan Verb" and to give a talk on complex predicates.


More News

Antje Strauß has been granted a three years DFG project on "The role of theta oscillations for prelexical abstraction". A series of EEG experiments will be conducted together with Carsten Eulitz in the Neurolinguistics group of our department but also in collaboration with Anne-Lise Giraud at the University of Geneva as well as with David Poeppel at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. Our warmest congratulations!


Publications by Members of the Department

  • Czypionka, Anna, Dörre, Laura and Bayer, Josef. Inverse Case attraction - experimental evidence for a syntactically guided process. Accepted for publication in Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.


Acquisitions of the Library

Yavaş, Mehmet S.: Romance-Germanic bilingual phonology
Zirker, Angelika: Dimensions of iconicity
Álvarez González, Albert: Verb valency changes
Duff, Patricia: Language socialization
Meßmer, Moritz: Imperfective readings in Spanish via glue semantics
Fernández, Eva M.: Handbook of psycholinguistics
Ehrmann, Nicole: Strukturen der Konzeptualisierung frühkindlicher Mehrsprachigkeit
Epping, Clara: Sprachliche Interaktion im multikulturellen Kindergarten
Kozin, Alexander: Consecutive interpreting





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