Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXXIV: October 2018

This is the 124th 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 October 2018 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in September 2018.

A warm welcome to Grazia Di Pisa and Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares who have joined the Department to work as Early Stage Researchers on the MultiMind project.

We also welcome Frederik Hartmann who is joining us as a new PhD student, working with George Walkden on modelling the early interrelationships between the Germanic languages.

Irati Bravo is our new lector for the Basque Language and Culture. The lectorship is financed by the Etxepare Basque Institute since 2011. Irati Bravo replaces Estibaliz Ortiz de Vinaspre Guzman who went back to the Basque Country after having spent three years in Konstanz. Thank you, Esti, for your excellent committment to teach the Basque language and to convey the Basque culture to our students. And welcome, Irati, to Konstanz! Eskerrik asko, Esti, eta ongi etorri, Irati!

Jan Casalicchio left Konstanz and the Humboldt-Stipendium at the end of September, to go back to Utrecht where he's working in an ERC project ("Microcontact"). He would like to say a big thank you to all the members of the Department for their kindness and hospitality. We say goodbye and are happy to see him back in Konstanz soon, when he will give his talk at the Department Colloquium on Novemver 15th.

We say goodbye and congratulations to Henri Kauhanen, who is leaving us in October to take up an ESRC Data Analytics & Society postdoctoral position at the University of Manchester.

From October 8th to 10th the FOR-211 workshop on Recent Issues in the Syntax of Questions will be held at our department (room Y 311). The workshop was organised by Josef Bayer, Georg A. Kaiser and Katharina Kaiser. Further information can be found on the workshop-website.

The concluding conference "The Many What Ifs" of the research unit What if (FOR-1614) will take place at the University of Konstanz from October 11th to 13th. More information can be found here.

• George Walkden is giving two invited talks in Aarhus on October 3rd and 5th: "Scandinavians and verb-second in Northumbrian Old English" and "Proto-Indo-European: a language without Merge?" On October 12th he’s giving an invited talk in Trento on “Preposition stranding in Early West Germanic”.

• Theo Marinis will give the keynote talk on "Literacy education and multilingualism: lessons from children with low socio-economic background in India" at the conference Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA) in Palermo, Italy from October 4th to 6th.

• Michael Zimmermann and Katharina Kaiser will give a talk entitled "Refining current insights into the wh-in-situ interrogative construction in French: the case of Contemporary Hexagonal French" at the Workshop Recent Issues in the Syntax of Questions, in Konstanz, from October 8th to 10th.

• Andreas Trotzke will give an invited talk on "Exploring the multidimensionality of exclamatives" at the University of Chicago on October 11th. More information can be found here.

• Regine Eckardt will present on "Evidentials and subjective defeasible inference — A modal analysis of wohl" at Frankfurt/Main University. The talk is part of a workshop on Propositionalism in Linguistic Semantics, taking place on October 12th.

• Andreas Trotzke will give an invited talk on "The syntax-emotion interface: A new approach to exclamatives" at UiT Tromsø on October 26th. More information can be found here.

• Jenny Yu and Katharina Zahner gave a talk at Interspeech, which was held in Hyderabad, India, from September 2nd to 6th. The talk was entitled "Compression and Truncation in Australian English and Southern German."

• Alexandra Engel and Adriana Hanulikova gave a talk entitled "Processing of case variation in German prepositional phrases" at the workshp Socially Situated Language Processing (SSLP 2018), Berlin, from September 4th to 5th.

• Adriana Hanulikova also gave a talk entitled "Effects of talker identity on speech comprehension across the lifespan" at SSLP 2018.

• The following members of the department were presenting at EuroSLA, taking place in Münster from September 4th to 8th:
  • Tanja Kupisch was hosting a Language Learning round table discussion entitled "Does input make a difference? Yes! Substantial? It depends …" with Tom Rankin.
• Anika Lloyd-Smith, Marieke Einfeldt & Tanja Kupisch were presenting a talk entitled "Italian-German bilinguals: The effects of HL use on the majority and minority language".
• Anika Lloyd-Smith and Tanja Kupisch were co-authors of a talk entitled "Input Experiences Determine Heritage Speaker Linguistic Outcomes" alongside Fatih Bayram and Jason Rothman.
• Miriam Geiss and Tanja Kupisch presented a paper entitled "Gender cues in L1-Russian children acquiring German as an early L2", co-authored by Marit Westergaard & Natalia Mitrofanova.
• Tanja Kupisch was co-author of a poster entitled "ProSeg: A comparable corpus of spoken L2 French"alongside Elisabeth Delais-Roussaire, Paolo Mairano, Fabian Santiago, and Frida Splendido.

• The following members of the department presented their work at Sinn und Bedeutung 23 (SuB) in Barcelona, Spain, from September 5th to 7th:
  • Maria Biezma gave a talk on "Presupposing questions".
• Regine Eckardt and Gisela Disselkamp gave a talk on "Self-addressed questions and indexicality — The case of Korean".
• Felix Frühauf co-presented a poster (with Berry Claus and Manfred Krifka) on “Negation and polarity-ambiguous propositional anaphors”.
• Erlinde Meertens, Sophie Egger and Maribel Romero presented on "The Role of Multiple Accent in Alternative Questions".

• Adriana Hanulikova presented a poster entitled "Effects of talker identity on speech comprehension across the lifespan" at AMLaP2018 in Berlin, from September 6th to 8th.

• George Walkden gave a talk at the Gersum Project conference in Cambridge, UK, September 7th, on “Scandinavians and verb-second in Northumbrian Old English”.

• COMMA 2018 (Computational Model of Arguments) in Warsow (September 11th to 14th) featured three ADD-up contributions with Annette Hautli-Janisz as (co-)author. The demo paper "ADD-up: Visual Analytics for Augmented Deliberative Democracy" was a joint effort of VALIDA and ADD-up (authors: Brian Plüss, Mennatallah El-Assady, Fabian Sperrle, Valentin Gold, Katarzyna Budzynska, Annette Hautli-Janisz and Chris Reed), the paper in the ArgPhil workshop was about "Conventional Implicatures in Computational Argumentation" (authors: Annette Hautli-Janisz, Brian Plüss, Katarzyna Budzynska, Valentin Gold and Chris Reed) the one in the ArgSoc workshop was titled "Towards Deliberation Analytics: Stream Processing of Argument Data for Deliberative Communication" (authors: Valentin Gold, Brian Plüss, Mennatallah El-Assady, Fabian Sperrle, Katarzyna Budzynska, Annette Hautli-Janisz and Chris Reed).

• Ryan Bochnak gave a talk on September 14th in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. The title of his talk was "Combining coordination and focus in Washo".

• Bettina Braun gave an invited talk at the workshop "Prosodic variation across languages: The state-of-the-art in comparative prosodic research“ at the University of Leiden, from September 14th to 15th. The workshop was organized by Janet Grijzenhout and colleagues.

• In the same workshop, Katharina Zahner presented a poster on "The processing of pitch accent type and stress in German infants and adults", and a poster on "Compression and truncation in Australian English and Southern German", together with Jenny Yu. Nathalie Czeke also attended the workshop.

• Jana Neitsch presented a poster with the title „The prosody of rhetorical questions in consideration of context" at DIMA VIII in Sønderborg, Denmark, from September 19th to 21nd.

• Theo Marinis together with Federico Faloppa, Tony Capstick, Shirley Reynolds & Doug Saddy (University of Reading) was organising the final conference of the ProLanguage project on September 20th to 21st at the University of Reading, UK. The ProLanguage project is a multiple partner project that addressed how language and language policies in refugee camps, and in facilities outside refugee camps can enhance their physical and mental health, act as social protection, enhance their chances for mobility, and facilitate their integration into the destination society.

• Regine Eckardt presented at the philosophical colloquium at the University of Milano, Italy on September 24th. Her talk addressed wohl as an evidential marker in German.

• Theo Marinis gave the talk "Multiliteracy in action: learning to read in the heritage language supports literacy skills in the majority language" at the Symposium Paradigm shift in language education for the development of multiliterate and plurilingual agencies organised by the European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism (ECSPM) at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, from September 26th to 27th.

In the second half of September, Ryan Bochnak conducted fieldwork in the Washo community in Dresslerville, Nevada, USA. He worked with community elders and language teachers (see picture), investigating various topics in semantics and syntax, such as aspect, future time reference, coordination, focus, and complementation.


From September 20th to 22nd Anna Czypionka was teaching a course on "Eyetracking during reading: Setting up experiments and analyzing data" at the University of Wrocław, Poland.

Jana Neitsch is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Sønderborg, Electrical Engeneering: Communication and Innovation at the Institute of Design and Communication, from September 6th until December 12th.

Andreas Trotzke will teach a PhD course on "The syntax-pragmatics interface: Bridging theory and experiment" together with Petra Schumacher (U Cologne) at UiT Tromsø from October 23rd to October 25th. More information can be found here.

More News

Back in June, Annette Hautli-Janisz was selected as a Konstanzia Fellow by the Office for Equal Opportunity, Family Affairs and Diversity. Her mentor until the end of 2019 will be PD Dr. Katarzyna Budzynska from ARG-tech, University of Dundee, and the Polish Academy of Sciences, and they will work on computational ethos, an area in Artificial Intelligence Budzynska recently established. Our congratulations!

The Department of Linguistics invites applicants for two PhD studentships within the field of Multilingualism who will work with Prof Theo Marinis to conduct research on multilingual child language development. Deadline: 15 October 2018. Further information can be found here.

• Dörre, Laura, Anna Czypionka, Andreas Trotzke, and Josef Bayer. 2018.The processing of German modal particles and their counterparts. Linguistische Berichte 255, 58-91.

• Günther, Fritz, Eva Smolka, and Marco Marelli. in press. ‘Understanding’ differs between English and German: Capturing systematic language differences of complex words. Cortex. (online access)

• Leminen, Alina, Eva Smolka, Jon A. Duñabeitia, and Pliatsikas Christos. in press. Morphological processing in the brain: the good (inflection), the bad (derivation), and the ugly (compounding). Cortex. (online access) /https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.016//

• Theodoros Marinis and Ian Cunnings. Using Psycholinguistic Techniques in a Second Language Teaching Setting. In: Clare Wright, Thirsten Piske & Martha Young-Scholten (Eds.). Mind Matters in SLA. Multilingual Matters.

Burger, Thomas: Rhetorik für Lehrkräfte

Mesthrie, Rajend: Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics

Hough, Carole: Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming

Ochs, Elinor: Living Narrative

Dixon, R. M. W.: Are Some Languages Better than Others?

Krongauz, Maksim Anisimovič: Sto Jazykov

Weiß, Pauline: Innere Struktur der DP in den altindogermanischen Artikelsprachen

Stolze, Radegundis: Übersetzungstheorien