Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXXII: August 2018

This is the 122nd 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 August 2018 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in July 2018.

Mariana Akemi Shimabukuro from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) will be a visiting PhD student at Konstanz from August 1 to October 31 this year. She is visiting as a part of project D02 of the SFB-TRR 161, which Christin Schätzle is in, and will be working on the extraction of linguistic features for visualization. She will be concentrating in particular on language learner corpora and will be working on a joint project with Moritz Messmer and Menna El-Assady (Computer Science) on visualization techniques for CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning).

On Thursday, July 5th, Mirjam Schmalz (University of Zurich) gave a guest lecture as part of Magdalena Leitner's MA Seminar "Varieties of English". Mirjam talked about her research project on perceptual dialectology of English on St Kitts and Nevis.

From July 16th to August 2nd, students of the seminar „Migration und Sprache - am Beispiel der romanischen Sprachen“ will exhibit their posters about language contact and migration in romance languages. The vernissage was on July 16th at 6pm in the Bürgerbüro Konstanz.
The project is a cooperation of the seminar and the integration commissioner of Konstanz and is supported by the Transfer Lehre Team of the university.

• Mark-Matthias Zymla will give a talk with the title "Annotation of the Syntax/Semantics interface as a Bridge between Deep Linguistic Parsing and TimeML" at the ISA-14, The 14th Joint ACL – ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation in Santa Fe, USA, on August 25th.

• George Walkden is organizing a workshop on “English as a syntactic outlier” at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL XX), from August 29th to 30th, with Ian Roberts (Cambridge).

• Andrea Beltrama gave a talk with the title "Iconicity, precision, and corrections. The social meaning of pragmatic detail" at the Sociolinguistic, Psycholinguistic and Formal Perspectives on Meaning Workshop in Paris, France, from July 2nd to 3rd.

• Jan Casalicchio took part at the 13th Cambridge Italian Dialects Syntax-Morphology Meeting, organised in Messina (Sicily), from July 2nd to 4th, presenting a quantitative study on the changes in the use of subject pronouns in young speakers of the Venetan dialect (joint work with the Utrecht PhD student Alberto Frasson).

• Adriana Hanulikova gave a talk entitled "Wahrnehumg dialektaler Variation: eine empirische Studie zur Rolle der Sprecher und Hörer" at Deutscher Sprachatlas in Marburg on July 4th.

• George Walkden was giving a talk on July 5th at the Wuppertaler Linguistisches Forum with the title "In defence of the information-structural approach to V3 in Germanic".

• Farhat Jabeen gave a talk at the 20th International Congress of Linguistics (ICL 20) in Cape Town, South Africa, from July 2nd to 6th. The title of her talk was "Clash of boundaries: Realization of focus vs. intonational phrase boundary tones in Urdu/Hindi".

• Anna-Maria Waibel presented a poster on “Evaluating Speech Comprehension in Patients with Disorders of Consciousness: Towards an Optimized Paradigm for N400-Effect Elicitation”, (co-authored by Czypionka, A., Spiteri, S., Hassa, T., Kaps, M., & Eulitz, C.) at SAMBA (Salzburg Mind - Brain Annual Meeting) in Salzburg, Austria, on July 12th to 13th.

• Moritz Meßmer and Mark-Matthias Zymla presented at Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) conference in Vienna, Austria, from July 17th to 19th. Teir talk had the title "The Glue Semantics Work Bench: A Modular Toolkit for Exploring Linear Logic and Glue Semantics".

• Tina Bögel also gave a talk at the LFG conference which was entitled "Vafsi Oblique pronouns: stress-related placement patterns" Co-authors are Saeed Yousefi and Mahinnaz Mirdeghan from the Shahid Beheshti University in Teheran.

• Magdalena Leitner presented a paper at the ISLE 5 conference in London, 17-20 July 2018. The title of the talk was "Advice on early 18th-century relationship problems: Investigating the pragmatics of an emergent tradition"

Andreas Trotzke will teach a summer school on "The grammar-pragmatics interface in second and foreign language teaching" at TU Braunschweig from August 31st to September 4th. More information (incl. general program) can be found here

More News

We congratulate Andreas Trotzke who has been awarded an IDEX research grant by Université de Bordeaux to conduct his project "Exploring discourse particles in Basque" together with Ricardo Etxepare and Urtzi Etxeberria.

Our congratulations to Tina Bögel who received a Mentorship grant from the Zukunftskolleg for her collaboration with Alice Turk from the University of Edinburgh.
The first meeting will take place during the last week of August where they will work on their project on the relation between language redundancy and prosodic boundary strength.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Czypionka, Anna & Tanja Kupisch. to appear. (The) polar bears are pink. How (the) Germans interpret (the) definite articles in plural subject DPs. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.

• Klimek-Jankowska, Dorota, Anna Czypionka, Wojciech Witkowski, Joanna Błaszczak. 2018. The time course of processing perfective and imperfective aspect in Polish - Evidence from self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments. Acta Linguistica Academica 65(2–3), 293–351 DOI: 10.1556/2062.2018.65.2–3.4

• Trotzke, Andreas. 2018. DP-internal modal particles: A case study of German ja. Studia Linguistica 72, 322-339. DOI:10.1111/stul.12052.