Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXVII: March 2018

This is the 117th 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 March 2018 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in February 2018.

We welcome Sandy Ciroux at our department!
She has joined the department as a new PhD student in Sven Lauer's Emmy Noether group What is it to ask a question?. Sandy, who joins us from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, will work on the semantics and pragmatics of rhetorical questions.

Prof. Kjell Johan Sæbø (Universitetet i Oslo) is visiting the department from February 22nd to March 7th under the auspices of the Mentorship Programme of the Zukunftskolleg. To set up a meeting with Prof. Sæbø during this time, send an email to Sven Lauer.

On March 5th at 15:00 Jennifer Arnold will give a special edition of her DGfS talk: "Is prosody an intentional signal of information structure?"

From March 20th to 23rd Caroline Féry (Goethe-University Frankfurt) will give a Blockseminar on intonation and prosodic structure for PhD students.

On February 1st, Emily Hanink gave a talk on "Like, hedging and mirativity. A unified account".

Lelia Glass gave a talk on "Postsuppositions block pragmatic inferences: Evidence from the Mandarin belief verb yiwei" in the 'SuP meeting on February 12th.

Marieke Einfeldt, Katharina Kaiser and Carmen Widera were organizing a conference for young academics in Romance linguistics called LIMES. It took place on February 23rd and 24th in Konstanz. For the programme visit the conference website.

• The following members of the department will present at the 40. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Stuttgart from March 7th to 9th.
  • Andrea Beltrama was invited to give a talk on "Subjective assertions and inquisitiveness: a hybrid speech act?" in AG 3.
• Ryan Bochnak (with co-author Martina Martinovic of the University of Florida) will be presenting "Unifying the many readings of Wolof imperfective di" in AG 4.
• Josef Bayer and Martin Salzmann will give a talk on "That-trace effects without traces: in favor of a phonological EPP" in AG 6.
• Annette Hautli-Janisz, Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli and Tatjana Scheffler are chairing the workshop on "Why indeed? Questions at the interface of theoretical and computational linguistics" (AG 7).
• Sven Lauer and Sunwoo Jeong will give a talk on "The functional heterogeneity of interrogatives: An optimistic approach" in AG 7.
• Mark-Matthias Zymla will present on "Linguistic Variation in the Realization of Rhetorical Questions — Providing Semantics and Pragmatics for German RQs" in AG 7 and he will present a poster with the title "Storing and Visualizing Semantic Annotation for Treebank Applications".
• Georg Kaiser and Katharina Kaiser will give a talk with the title "What parallel texts can tell us about word order variation and change. A case study on wh-interrogatives in Romance" in AG 7.
• And Farhat Jabeen and Miriam Butt will talk about "Word Order and Question Type: A Corpus Analysis of Bollywood Scripts" in AG 7.
• Doris Penka will give a talk on "The Degree Proform so in German" in AG 8.
• Alexandra Rehn will give a talk with the title "Loss, Optionality and Free Variation of Categories" in AG 9. She will also be the speaker of the DGfS-Doktorandenforum with the topic "Standardsprache vs. Dialekte/ Gesprochene Sprache als Untersuchungsgegenstand für die Linguistik".
• Janet Grijzenhout, Monika Lindauer and Katharina Zahner are chairing workshop AG 14: "Variable perception and production correlates for word stress in first language acquisition and child second language learning".
• Eva Csipak will give a talk on "Conditionalizing referential uses of definite descriptions" in AG 15.

• Andreas Trotzke will give a talk on "Syntactic explorations into the expressive dimension" at UPF Barcelona on March 8th.

• Erkam Ekinci gave a talk on his dissertation project "Academic Language in the Multilingual Classroom" at the Young Researchers Workshop in Cologne on February 6th.

• Constantin Freitag presented a poster entitled "Intervention effects in NPI-environments: A case of scope incompatibility?", and together with Yvonne Viesel another poster with the title "On the application of multiple discourse particles in rhetorical questions" at the Linguistic Evidence in Tübingen (February 15th to 17th).

• Georg A. Kaiser, Katharina Kaiser und Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli gave a presentation with the title “Word order change in Romance interrogatives. Implications from a parallel text analysis of Bible translations” at the Workshop Parallel text analysis in diachronic research in Marburg on February 22th .

• Regine Eckardt presented at the workshop GraModAT (Grammaticalization of Mood, Aspect and Tense) in Göttingen on February 26th. Her talk was on "Perfect twice. Form and meanings of double-perfect constructions"

Regine Eckardt will spend a month at The Hebrew University at Jerusalem from March 17th to April 16th. She was awarded a Mandel Senior Fellowship, which allows international scholars to lecture at the university on special topics. Her course deals with diachronic semantics in grammaticalization.

Andreas Trotzke has joined the editorial board of the newly established John Benjamins journal "Evolutionary Linguistic Theory".

• Bayer, Josef. 2018. Reparatur in der Grammatik. Anmerkungen zum Sprachdesign. In: Elisabeth Leiss & Sonja Zeman (eds.), Die Zukunft von Grammatik - die Grammatik der Zukunft. Festschrift für Werner Abraham anlässlich seines 80. Geburtstags. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. 51-74.

• Czypionka, Anna & Carsten Eulitz. to appear. Lexical case marking affects the processing of animacy in simple verbs, but not particle verbs: evidence from event-related potentials. Glossa.

• Blaszczak, Joanna, Anna Czypionka, & Dorota Klimek-Jankowska. to appear. Why are verbal nouns more verbal than finite verbs? New insights into the interpretation of the P200 verbal signature. Glossa.

• Weber, Talina, Muna Schönhuber & Janet Grijzenhout. 2018. The prosody of yes/no-questions in German first language acquisition. In Proceedings of the Conference on Phonetics & Phonology in German-speaking countries (P&P 13), Berlin, Germany.online access