Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXV: January 2018

A happy, healthy and succesful 2018 to all of you!
This is the 115th 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 January 2018 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in December 2017.

We welcome Svenja Schmid as a new PhD-student in the group of Georg Kaiser and wish her a great start in Konstanz.

Miriam Butt and Christin Schätzle are organizing a Workshop on Data Provenance and Annotation in Computational Linguistics together with Melanie Herrschel (University of Stuttgart) in Prague on January, 22nd. The workshop is co-located with the 16th Treebanks and Linguistic Theory conference (TLT16), taking place at the Charles University in Prague from January, 23rd to 24th.

The workshop seeks to bring together researchers from the fields of provenance, data annotation, and data curation with researchers working within computational linguistics and dealing with the annotation of language data in order to start a dialog and exchange best practices and experiences.

Members of the department are welcome to participate, but are asked to register for the workshop via the TLT16 homepage. Registration is free of charge.
For more information, visit the workshop website.

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), was held on December 15th from 9:45-18:00h. The invited speakers were Dr. Alexis Hervais-Adelmann (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, who gave a talk on "Language and the motor system") and Dr. Ralf Schmälzle (the Department of Communication, Michigan State University, giving a talk on "From neurons to nations: Neuroimaging of communication").

• George Walkden is presenting a paper with the title "Preposition stranding in Early West Germanic" at the 13th Forum for Germanic Language Studies in Edinburgh on 11th January.

• Regine Eckardt is invited speaker at an incentive workshop of the projected Forschgergruppe “The future in European languages” at the University of Köln. She will present on “Notwendiges und hinreichendes für eine neue Futur-Form” on 12th January.

• Katharina Kaiser will be presenting a poster with the title "Word order alternations in (Brazilian) Portuguese and French wh-in-situ interrogatives" at the Geneva WH-orkshop on Optional Insituness, that will take place at the University of Geneva from January 16th to 18th.

• Simon Dold and Georg A. Kaiser participated 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 presented a paper on “Basque-Spanish language contact – interrogative structures in comparison” and Georg A. Kaiser gave 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 presented 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 presented 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 addition, Sven Lauer and Maribel Romero gave invited talks at the satellite workshop Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary 2, held from December 18th to 19th in Amsterdam.

Tanja Kupisch has just taken over the role as co-editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (LAB). Our congratulations!
LAB is an international peer-reviewed journal which provides an outlet for cutting-edge studies on bilingualism, including work on: adult L2 acquisition/processing, simultaneous child bilingualism, child L2 acquisition/processing, adult and child heritage language bilingualism, L1 attrition in L2/Ln environments, and adult/child L3/Ln acquisition/processing.

• Kaiser, Georg A. & Harald Völker (Hgg.). 2017. Philologie und Grammatik. Berlin: De Gruyter (= Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 415).

• Zhao, Lucy, Nicole Dehé & Victoria A. Murphy. 2018. From pitch to purpose: The prosodic-pragmatic mapping of [I + verb] belief constructions in English and Mandarin. Journal of Pragmatics 123: 57-77.

• Zimmermann, Michael. 2017. Zu französischen Konstruktionen des Typs je . . . –ons. – In: G.A. Kaiser und H. Völker (Hgg.): Philologie und Grammatik, 163-185. Berlin: De Gruyter (= Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 415).