Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz


Issue CXXV: November 2018


Universitaet Konstanz


Topics of this issue:


This is the 125th 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 November 2018 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in October 2018.


New to Konstanz

A warm welcome to Julia Bacskai-Atkari, who is substituting this semester for the W3 in English Linguistics!

We welcome Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie as a visiting professor at our department. Elisabeth is Directeur de Recherche of the CNRS at the Université de Nantes (UMR 6310-LLING (Laboratoire Linguistique de Nantes)). Her stay is funded by the DAAD program 'Französische Gastdozenturen zur Förderung von Studiengängen mit Frankreichbezug’. Elisabeth will stay with us during this winter term, and she will be teaching three classes in French and General linguistics.


Visiting Konstanz

Jordan Kodner, a PhD student at Penn working on computational approaches to language acquisition and change, will be visiting Konstanz from November 8th to 12th and giving a talk (details to be announced). Please contact George W if you’d like to meet Jordan and talk to him while he’s here.

Federica Cognola (Rome) will be visiting from November 20th to 22nd on an Erasmus exchange. She will be leading a session on “relaxed” verb-second at Walkden & Kaiser’s V2 seminar on Tuesday 20th, and giving a talk at the departmental colloquium on Thursday 22nd. Contact George if you’d like to meet her during her stay.


Leaving Konstanz

We say goodbye to Talina Weber, who left the Babyspeechlab on October 31st to take up a new position. We thank her for her work for the Forschergruppe and wish her all the best for the future!

We also say farewell and congratulations to Laura Dörre, who is leaving Konstanz in November to take up a postdoctoral position in Linguistics at the University of Münster.


Events at/by the Department

in October

From October 8th to 10th the FOR-211 workshop on Recent Issues in the Syntax of Questions was held at our department. 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) took place at the University of Konstanz from October 11th to 13th. More information can be found here.


Department and Research Colloquium in November
15.11.Jan Casalicchio: t.b.a.
22.11.Federica Cognola (Roma): t.b.a.
29.11.Harald Clahsen: Do bilingual children lag behind?


Save the Date!
The Department of Linguistics will host next year's CGSW (34th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop/CGSW 34, June 2019). More information can be found here.

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in November
  • Sophie Egger and Bettina Braun will give a talk on "What does it take to make a question biased? – Evidence from perception data" at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning at the 22nd SemDial in Aix-en-Provence, France on November 8th.
  • Ramona Wallner will also present her work at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in a talk entitled "Givenness and prosody, how French wh-in-situ questions are not linked to givenness".
  • On November 9th Georg A. Kaiser will present together with Klaus von Heusinger (Universität zu Köln) a paper on "Structure and nature of the wh-phrase and word order effects in Romance interrogatives" at the IX NEREUS International Workshop 'Morphosyntactic and semantic aspects of the DP in Romance and beyond’ at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal.
  • Alexandra Rehn and Ellen Brandner will run a workshop on "Dialectal variation vs. Standardization and Models of Language Change" at the SaRDiS conference (Saarbrücker Runder Tisch für Dialeksyntax/ Saarbrücken Roundtable of Dialect Syntax) which takes place from November 9th to 10th.
  • George Walkden will be giving a talk with the title “Proto-Indo-European: a language without Merge?” at the departmental colloquium at Tübingen on November 12th.
  • Carmen Widera is giving a talk with the title "La variation de l’emploi du pronom sujet explétif en français moderne - une analyse microdiachronique de l’oral" ('Variation in the use of expletive subject pronouns in modern French - a microdiachronic analysis of spoken French') at the conference 50 ans de linguistique sur corpus oraux : Apports à l'étude de la variation that will take place at the Université d'Orléans, France from November 15th to 17th.
  • On November 23th Georg A. Kaiser will give a talk together with Simon Dold at the International conference Biblias hispánicas: traducción vernácula en la Edad Media y Renacimiento. The title of the talk is: "La interpolación del sujeto (y otros constituyentes) en la oraciones interrogativas. Un estudio basado en traducciones bíblicas a lenguas iberorromances medievales" (‘The interpolation of the subject (and other constituents) in interrogatives. A study based on Bible translations into Medieval Iberoromance languages’) in Palma de Mallorca.
  • Natasha Korotkova is giving an invited talk entitled "The subjective heart of evidentiality" at the University of Göttingen on November 27th .

in October
  • Miriam Butt gave a talk on "Case and the Structure of Events” at the CASTLFish Seminar at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway on October 2nd.
  • George Walkden gave 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 gave an invited talk in Trento on “Preposition stranding in Early West Germanic”.
  • Michael Zimmermann and Katharina Kaiser gave 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 gave 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 presented on "Evidentials and subjective defeasible inference — A modal analysis of wohl" at Frankfurt/Main University. The talk was part of a workshop on Propositionalism in Linguistic Semantics, which took place on October 12th.
  • Miriam Butt gave a talk on "Case and the Structure of Events: Evidence from Indo-Aryan” at a workshop On the place of case in grammar held in Rethymnon, Crete, Greece from October 18th to 20th.
  • Rita Sevastjanova presented her joint work with Mennatallah El-Assady, Dr. Annette Hautli-Janisz, Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Rebecca Kehlbeck, Oliver Deussen, Daniel Keim, and Miriam Butt on "Mixed-initiative active learning for generating linguistic insights in question classification” at the IEEE VIS Workshop on Data Systems for Interactive Analysis (DSIA) in Berlin on October 21st.
  • Rita Sevastjanova presented her joint work with Fabian Beck, Basil Ell, Cagatay Turkay, Rafael Henkin, Miriam Butt, Daniel Keim and Mennatallah El-Assady on "Going beyond visualization: Verbalization as complementary medium to explain machine learning models” at the IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for AI Explainability (VISxAI) in Berlin on October 22nd.
  • Andreas Trotzke gave 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.
  • On October 29th Theo Marinis gave a talk at the departmental seminar at the University Milano Bicocca with the title "Multiliteracy in primary school: the relationship between learning to read in the heritage language and literacy skills in the majority language".

Travelling

Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli completed a two-months internship at the Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence Lab of Nuance Communications Inc. in Sunnyvale, California.


More News

Our congratulations to Miriam Butt, Tanja Kupisch and Theo Marinis, who are part of the Excellence Cluster on Social (In)equality that was granted to the University of Konstanz in September 2018.

Congratulations to George Walkden for winning this year’s LUKS Prize for outstanding teaching in linguistics! The prize was awarded at the Dies academicus on October 19th.


Publications by Members of the Department

  • Czypionka, Anna, Felix Golcher, Joanna Błaszczak, and Carsten Eulitz. Accepted. When verbs have bugs: Lexical and syntactic processing costs of split particle verbs in sentence comprehension. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience .
  • Farasyn, Melissa, George Walkden, Sheila Watts, and Anne Breitbarth. 2018. The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus. In Richard J. Whitt (ed.), Diachronic corpora, genre, and language change, 282-300. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • von Heusinger, Klaus, Georg A. Kaiser, and Alazne Arriortua. 2018. Differential object marking in ditransitive constructions in Basque. In: T. Parodi (ed.), Proceedings of the VIII NEREUS International Workshop: "Referential Properties of the Romance DP in the Context of Multilingualism". Konstanz: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz (= Arbeitspapier 129), 25-61.


Acquisitions of the Library

Fischer, Steven R.: History of Language






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