Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Konstanz

Issue CXXVII: January 2019

A happy, healthy and succesful 2019 to all of you!


This is the 127th 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 January 2019 as well as short reports abut events, presentations, etc. in December 2018.

We welcome Angelika Golegos who joined Theo Marinis' research group on Multilingualism. Her PhD will investigate language abilities of bilingual children.

Muna Schönhuber joined the MultiMind team as its project manager. We wish her all the best in this new position!

James Griffiths’s postdoctoral fellowship at the Zukunftskolleg finished on December 31st 2018. James has now returned to the Netherlands, where he is teaching syntax and morphology in the English Language and Linguistics department at Leiden University. We say goodbye and wish him all the best!
James’s farewell message: “thanks to everyone in the department for making my time doing research and teaching at Konstanz so personally and professionally rewarding. Because nobody would want to be away from such a beautiful place for too long, I hope to return for a research visit or a conference as soon as I can!”

Miriam Butt organised a workshop on Word Order in Scandinavian languages together with Annie Zaenen (Stanford University) and Elisabet Engdahl (University of Gothenburg) on December 13th and 14th in Konstanz. More information about the workshop can be found here.

• George Walkden is giving two talks in Oslo in January: one with the title “Rich agreement and the stability of V2 in early English: some problems” at the workshop Secrets of Success on January 11th, and one with the title “Proto-Indo-European: a language without Merge?” for the Language Change seminar on January 15th.

• Natasha Korotkova is giving an invited talk at the Formal Linguistics Research Group seminar at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, on January 17th.

• Liliane Haegeman and Andreas Trotzke will give a talk on "PP-internal particles in Dutch as evidence for PP-internal discourse structure" at Saarland University, Saarbrücken on January 21st.

• Regine Eckardt takes part in a workshop on Narrativität ('narrativity'), organized by Prof. Zeman at Berlin on January 25th. The presentations will be made available as a special issue of the Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik.

• Bettina Braun, Daniela Wochner, Katharina Zahner and Nicole Dehé presented a paper on the "Classification of interrogatives as information-seeking or rhetorical questions" at the 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST, December 4th to 7th) in Sydney, Australia.

• At the same conference, Katharina Zahner & Bettina Braun gave a talk with the title "F0 peaks are a necessary condition for German infants’ perception of stress in metrical segmentation."

• Tina Bögel gave an invited talk on "Frequency effects and prosodic boundary strength" at the Phonology Colloqium of the University of Frankfurt on December 5th.

• Erlinde Meertens presented a talk at the 13th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13), Göttingen, on December 5th, titled "The pragmatic effects of macedonian li - an empirical study" (with Izabela Jordanoska).

• Theo Marinis gave the talk “Literacy and cognition: Evidence for unprivileged multilingual contexts in India” at the workshop Biliterate development in diverse contexts organised by the SFB 1252 Prominence in Language at the University of Cologne from December 13th to 14th.

• George Walkden was the guest speaker at the 40th Symposium on Old English, Middle English and Historical Linguistics in the Low Countries, which took place in Leiden on 14th December. His talk was on “Scandinavians and verb-second in Northumbrian Old English”.

• On December 17th Georg A. Kaiser was invited to the workshop Approches socio-linguistiques de la distance (’Sociolinguistic approaches of distance’) at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne where he presented a paper on "Contact de langues et distance typologique" (’Language contact and typological distance’).

Our congratulations to Andreas Trotzke who has been awarded a DAAD grant (PPP/PROCOPE Frankreich) for a new collaboration with Université Paris Diderot on the project "Surprise questions from a comparative perspective (SURQUE)."

Josef Bayer is invited to teach a 3-weeks seminar at the University of Verona in March 2019.

• Fonteyn, Lauren, & George Walkden. 2019. Review of Fischer, De Smet & van der Wurff (2017), A brief history of English syntax. Journal of Historical Syntax 3(1), 1-12. Available online.

• Degen, Judith, Andreas Trotzke, Gregory Scontras, Eva Wittenberg & Noah D. Goodman. 2019. Definitely, maybe: A new experimental paradigm for investigating the pragmatics of evidential devices across languages. Journal of Pragmatics 140, 33-48.

• The paper "When morphological structure overrides meaning: evidence from German prefix and particle verbs" by Eva Smolka, Gary Libben and Wolfgang U. Dressler, in press in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience is now available online.

• Thoms, Gary, & George Walkden. 2019. vP preposing with and without remnant movement. Journal of Linguistics 55(1), 161-214. Available online.

• Walkden, George. 2018. Review of Los & de Haan (eds.) (2017), Word order change in acquisition and language contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade. Language 94(4), 985-987. Available online.

Piaget, Jean: Théories du Langage, Théories de l'Apprentissage

Onea Gáspár, Edgar: Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

Lindner, Thomas: Indogermanische Grammatik