Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXIX: May 2018

This is the 119th 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 May 2018 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in April 2018.

Theo Marinis joined the Department to take the Chair in Multilingualism and to direct the MA in Multilingualism. Theo joined us from the UK, where he has been working since 2000 at the Universities of Essex, University College London and the University of Reading. Since 2012, Theo was Professor of Multilingualism and Language Development at the University of Reading and since 2016 he was the Director of the Centre for Literacy & Multilingualism. We welcome him to our department!

As of May 2018 Toqeer Ehsan is visiting Konstanz from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore (Pakistan) for one year via a “sandwich” PhD stipend from the DAAD to work on a statistical syntax parser for Urdu. Welcome to Konstanz!

Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran (Sarves for short) is visiting Konstanz as a PhD student from the University of Moratuwa, Colombo (Sri Lanka) this summer semester. He is working on a computational LFG grammar for Tamil.

Tamás Eitler will be visiting the department on an Erasmus Staff Mobility visit from May 18th to 24th.

Workshop on Clause Typing and the Syntax-to-Discourse Relation in Head-Final Languages Schloss Freudental, May 15th to 17th, organizers: Josef Bayer and Yvonne Viesel You are welcome to attend the talks. The program is available on the workshop website.

in April

Alexander Pfaff (University of Oslo) visited Konstanz in April and gave two talks: “Patterns of Modification in the Icelandic Noun Phrase - Syntax/Semantics/Diachrony”, on April 17th, and “Adjectival Inflection as Diagnostic for Structural Position in the Icelandic Noun Phrase”, at the Fachbereichskolloquium on April 19th. The visit was part of the project "Constraints on syntactic variation: noun phrases in early Germanic", on which George Walkden is collaborating.

On April 26th at 10:00 Güliz Günes gave a talk on "Prosodic constituency and syntax-prosody mapping in Turkish".

On April 30th at 18:45 George Walkden gave his inaugural lecture (Antrittsvorlesung) with the title “English: the black sheep of the Germanic family?”. Everyone is welcome to attend!

• Laura Dörre is invited to give a talk on "Partikeln und ihre unterschiedlichen Bedeutungen — Korpuslinguistische und psycholinguistische Untersuchungen" at the Linguistisches Forschungskolloquium, Institut für Germanistik, University of Hamburg on May 2nd.

• Carmen Widera and Georg Kaiser are giving a talk with the title "Astérix e os pronomes sujeitos – uma análise contrastiva do emprego dos pronomes sujeitos no português europeu e brasileiro" ('Asterix and the subject pronouns - a contrastive analysis of the use of subject pronouns in European and Brasilian Portuguese') at the Congresso Internacional em Variação Linguística nas Línguas Românicas that will take place from May 2nd to 4th at the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal.

• Theo Marinis will be one of the keynote speakers at the 1st Emirates Speech Language Pathology Conference in Abu Dhabi (May 4th to 5th) and will present two talks on "Language processing in children with Specific Language Impairment/Development Language Disorder" and "Language impairment in multilingual children".

• Ryan Bochnak will be Invited Speaker at SULA (Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas), which is being held at the University of Toronto on May 4th to 6th. His talk is called "Looking into the future", and is on future temporal reference cross-linguistically.

• The following members of the department will present their work at at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018), from May 7th to 12th in Miyajaki, Japan:
  • Bettina Braun and Katharina Zahner will give a presentation on the "Distribution and prosodic realization of German verb forms in infant-directed speech".
• Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Katharina Kaiser, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Georg Kaiser and Miriam Butt will present a poster on "A Multilingual Approach for Question Classification".
• Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Leo Vrana, Vigile-Marie Fabelle, Luna Bellani and Annette Hautli-Janisz will present their work on "A Structured and Visualized Legal Corpus of US State Bills" at the Workshop on Language Resources and Technologies for the Legal Knowledge Graph.
• Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Livy Real and Valeria de Paiva will give a presentation on "WordNet for 'Easy' Textual Inferences" at the Globalex Workshop.

• George Walkden is giving an invited talk with the title “Proto-Indo-European: a language without Merge?” at CamCos 7 on 12th May.

• James Griffiths and Güliz Güneş (University of Leiden) will give a talk entitled "An Indo-European Complementiser as a coordinator in Turkish: clausal versus subclausal appositions" at the workshop on Clause Typing and the Syntax-to-Discourse Relation in Head-Final Languages, which takes place at the Schloss Freudental from May 15th to 17th (organized by Josef Bayer and Yvonne Viesel).

• Georg Kaiser is Invited Speaker at the the II Encuentro sobre Dialectos del español / II Spanish Dialects Meeting, from May 17th to 18th at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain. The title of his talk is "Syntactic variation in wh-interrogatives in Spanish”.

• On May 22nd, Miriam Butt and Tina Bögel will give a talk on Urdu questions and the prosody-syntax interface at the The Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Tromsø.

• Bettina Braun will give an invited talk at PAIK (Phonological Association in Kansai), entitled "The phonology and phonetics of rhetorical and information-seeking questions" on May 26th.

• On April 03rd and 04th George Walkden gave a talk with the title “In defence of the information-structural approach to V3 in Germanic” in Caen, France.

• Nicole Dehé was Invited Speaker at the 1st Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory "How modular is syntax?", from April 6th to 7th at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her talk was on "Parenthesis and the syntax-prosody interface".

• Ramona Wallner was invited to give a talk on "Prosodic effects on French wh-in-situ" at the University of Nantes on April 6th.

• Adriana Hanulikova gave a talk on "How talker identity affects speech processing across the life span" at the workshop Language Comprehension across the Lifespan from April 9th to 10th in Freiburg.

• The following members of the department presented their work at GLOW 41 from April 10th to 14th in Budapest, Hungary:
  • María Biezma, Miriam Butt and Farhat Jabeen gave a talk on "Polar questions vs kya questions in Hindi/Urdu" in the workshop The grammar and pragmatics of interrogatives and their (special) uses
• Josef Bayer presented his work on "Particles ex-situ in emphatic wh-questions" in the same workshop.
• James Griffiths co-presented a poster with Güliz Güneş (Leiden University) and Anikó Lipták (Leiden University), entitled "Reprise Fragments in Minimalism: an in-situ analysis" (Main colloquium).

• Andreas Trotzke gave a talk on "Sprache im Kontext: Deutsche Modalpartikeln als Lehrstück des Sprachgebrauchs" at Pädagogische Hochschule Vorarlberg on April 12th.

• On April 13th Tina Bögel and Alice Turk gave a talk on "The influence of syntactic, word-bigram, and word frequency measures of language redundancy on prosodic phrasing in English" at the 2018 Colloquium of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians (BAAP) in Kent.

• Sven Lauer gave an invited talk entitled "Degrees of belief, (ir)rationality, and commitment" at the Meaning and Commitment workshop, held at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris on April 13th.

• Andreas Trotzke presented his paper "Approaching the pragmatics of exclamations experimentally" at WCCFL 36 (University of California, Los Angeles, April 20th to 22nd) and at CLS 54 (The University of Chicago, April 26th to 28th).

• Jan Casalicchio took part at the network meeting of the Alexander von Humboldt-foundation in Regensburg (April 25th to 27th), where he presented the project that he will carry out in Konstanz ("The syntax and acquisition of subject pronouns and pro-drop in the multilingual Rhaetoromance (Ladin) community of the Gardena/Gröden valley")

• Ramona Wallner gave a talk on "How prosody explains a superficial givenness constraint on French wh-in-situ questions" in the main session of the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) in Toronto, Canada from April 25th to 28th.

• María Biezma was also giving a talk at LSRL, which was entitled "A case of if-clauses on their own".

Miriam Butt traveled to Bielefeld along with Menna El-Assady and Daniel Keim (Computer Science) to participate in the Kick-Off workshop of the Priority Program RATIO (Robust Argumentation Machines) to present the joint project with Katharina Holzinger (Political Science) "Visual Analytics and Linguistics for Interpreting Deliberative Argmentation (VALIDA)”.

The EU funded Interdisciplinary Training Network (ITN) "The Multilingual Mind" (MultiMind) will be launched on May 8th. This is a 4-year international, multi-disciplinary, and multi-sectorial project that will train 15 early career researchers at 10 Universities and 2 non-academic organisations within Europe and beyond. MultiMind is being coordinated by Prof Theo Marinis who moved to the University of Konstanz at the beginning of April. The University of Konstanz will have 2 early career positions as part of MultiMind that will start in September 2018.

At the end of April Oxford University Press published the volume "Null subjects in Generative Grammar. A synchronic and diachronic approach", edited by Jan Casalicchio together with Federica Cognola. They also wrote the introductory chapter ("On the null subject phenomenon"), while another chapter was written by our Michael Zimmermann ("Null subjects, expletives and the status of Medieval French"). The other contributors are: Ciro Greco, Trang Phan & Liliane Haegeman, Ermenegildo Bidese and Alessandra Tomaselli, Theresa Biberauer, Michelle Sheehan, Nerea Madariaga, Verner Egerland, Mara Frascarelli, Helmut Weiß and Anna Volodina, and Henrik Rosenkvist.

• Bayer, Josef. 2018. Prima La Musica, Dopo Le Parole? A Small Note on a Big Topic. In: Gautam Sengupta, Shruti Sircar, Madhavi Gayathri Raman and Rahul Balusu (eds.) Perspectives on the Architecture and Acquisition of Syntax. Essays in Honor of R. Amritavalli. Singapore: Springer. 195-213.

• Contemory, Carla, Carlson, Matthew, & Marinis, Theodoros. 2018. On-Line Processing of English Which-Questions by Children and Adults: A Visual World Paradigm Study. Journal of Child Language 45(2), 415-441.

• Hanulikova, Adriana. 2018. The effect of perceived ethnicity on text comprehension under clear and adverse listening conditions. Linguistics Vanguard 4(1).

• Rehn, Alexandra. 2017. Zur Steuerung der Adjektivflexion im Alemannischen und Standarddeutschen. In: Christen, Helen, Peter Gilles, Christoph Purschke (eds.). Räume, Grenzen, Übergänge. Akten des 5. Kongresses der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Dialektologie des Deutschen (IGDD). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

• Smolka, Eva & Eulitz, Carsten. Accepted. Psycholinguistic Measures for German Verb Pairs: Semantic Transparency, Semantic Relatedness, Verb Family Size, Age of Reading Acquisition. Behavior Research Methods

Egan, Thomas: Cross-linguistic correspondences

Girik, Leonid Nikolaevič: Estestvennaja logika

Hyman, Larry M.: Phonological typology

Smith, Kelly Aaron: Functionalist and usage-based approaches to the study of language