Newsletter

This is the 193rd 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 July 2024 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in June 2024.

Events at/by the Department

Department and Research Colloquium in July

Department and Research Colloquium in June

in July

Georg Kaiser is organizing a workshop on Objects and object marking in Spanish, which will take place as part of his seminar of the same name on Friday, July 5th, 9:20-17:00 in G227a. In this workshop, experts and students of the seminar will each give a short presentation. One focus of the workshop is the didactic teaching of object marking in Spanish. The workshop will be held in Spanish.

in June

The Department of Linguistics hosted on June 19th-21st the closing workshop of the project MECORE: A cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions in clausal embedding, co-funded by the German DFG and the British AHRC. 

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

In July

• The following research will be presented at the Speech Prosody conference in Leiden between July 2nd- 5th:

1. Tianyi Zhao, Tina Bögel, Alice Turk, and Ricardo Napoleão de Souza:Language redundancy effects on the prosodic word boundary strength in Standard German (poster)
2. Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Tina Ghaemi, Tina Bögel, and Bettina Braun: Prosodic realization of rhetorical and information-seeking questions in Persian (poster)
3. Tina Bögel: The German negative prefixes in- and un-: nasal place assimilation (poster)
4. Mila Freiseis, Tianyi Zhao, and Tina Bögel: Semantic priming and prosodic structure: At the interface between language redundancy and acoustic salience (talk)
5. Marieke Einfeldt, Anna Huggenberg, Bettina Braun will present their talk entitled Between dialect and standard: Segmental and prosodic differences in Zurich German speakers.
6. Tamara Rathcke is presenting a poster. The presentation is entitled Taken by surprisal? On the role of linguistic predictability in speech rhythm. The work is co-authored by Tamara Rathcke, Chia-Yuan Lin, Eline Smit, and Diego Frassinelli.

7. Also Benazir Mumtaz and Miriam Butt have been accepted for a poster presentation. The title of their presentation is The Prosody of Polar vs. Alternative Questions in Urdu. Further details can be found here.

• Angelika Golegos and Theo Marinis will present a poster entitled Reference in children with Greek as a heritage language - When production and comprehension skills draw a different picture at the conference EuroSLA33, University of Montpellier, France, 3rd-6th July.
   
• On July 9th, Tamara Rathcke is giving an invited talk at the Linguistics research colloquium at the University of Kiel. Her presentation is entitled: Testing the interplay of phonology, rhythm, and cognitive resources in developmental dyslexia.
   
• At the IASCL 2024 conference (Prague, July 15th to July 19th), Anamaria Bentea will be the convenor of the symposium Romanian in the Bilingual World. As part of the symposium, she will also give a talk with Theo Marinis entitled What’s in a question? Comprehension and production of which-questions in child heritage Romanian.
  
  Furthermore at the IASCL 2024 conference Angelika Golegos, Flavia Adani, and Theo Marinis will present a poster entitled Measuring Working Memory in German-speaking children through a new Listening Span Task and Angelika Golegos and Theo Marinis will also present a poster entitled Children’s processing of pronoun ambiguity in German. 

In June

• Henri Kauhanen and George Walkden both presented at the Workshop on Understanding Grammar Change in Edinburgh on 4th-5th June. Henri’s title was Variational Learning: Anatomy of an algorithm, and George’s was Implicational universals, probabilities and grammar competition.
   
• Gemma McCarley presented the talk Accounting for Orality in a diachronic Spanish corpus on June 5th at the 13th Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference at the University of Zurich.
   
• Bettina Braun was invited to Bielefeld to give a talk on The prosody of rhetorical questions - evidence from production and perception on June, 5th.
   
• On June 12th, Hyewon Jang gave a talk titled A type of sarcasm that current theories fail to explain - Evidence from sarchasm at the third Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference (ELM3), University of Pennsylvania (online).
   
• Hyewon Jang also presented a paper co-authored with Diego Frassinelli at 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) on June 19th, Mexico City, Mexico. The title of the work is Generalizable Sarcasm Detection is Just Around the Corner, of Course!.
   
• Carmen Widera gave two talks on Variation et changement dans l'usage de il explétif – une étude comparative du français parlé à Montréal et à Orléans together with Claire Djuikui Dountsop from the Université de Montréal. They presented at Changement et variation au Canada (CVC 13) at the Université de Montréal (15th-16th June) and at Rencontres scientifiques universitaires Sherbrooke-Montpellier 2024 at the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada (19th-21st June).
   
• On June 19th, Gemma McCarley gave the talk Comparing null subject use across registers in Singapore English at the 45th ICAME Conference organized by University of Vigo.
   
• Leah Doroski, Raquel Montero Estebaranz, and Maribel Romero presented a poster entitled Spanish Neg-raising: Always in the mood for Neg-raising, sometimes in the mood for NPIs at ELM 3 (Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference), hold at the University of Pennsylvania on June 12th-14th.
   
• Diego Frassinelli presented the work on Comparison of Image Generation Models for Abstract and Concrete Event Descriptions at the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang) co-located with NAACL on June 21st, Mexico City, Mexico. It is a joint work with Mohammed Abdul Khaliq and Sabine Schulte im Walde.
   
• Hyewon Jang presented a paper co-authored with Moritz Jakob and Diego Frassinelli at the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang) co-located with NAACL on June 21st, Mexico City, Mexico. The title of the work is Context vs. Human Disagreement in Sarcasm Detection.
   
• George Walkden presented a joint work with Frederik Hartmann at the 25th Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS 25) conference at the University of Mannheim on 26th June, with the title The strength of the phylogenetic signal in syntactic data.
   
• Andreas Trotzke gave an invited commentary at the workshop Speech Act Related Operators at ZAS Berlin, June 27th-29th.

More News

• Maria Biezma, a former member of our department, has successfully been awarded tenure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Congratulations Maria!
   
• A new four year project called “DigSAL: addressing the Digital Divide for South Asian Languages” has been awarded under the DAAD’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) program. The project’s goal is to address and mitigate the digital divide with respect to South Asian languages. As part of this, it will build new computational tools for working with Sinhala, Urdu/Hindi and Tamil specifically, but South Asian languages more generally. To this end the project will also develop several new courses that are to be available freely on-line in the areas of Speech and Language Processing for South Asian languages. The project partners are the University of Konstanz, the University of Jaffna (Sri Lanka), the University of Moratuwa (Sri Lanka) and the University of Engineering and Technology (UET, Lahore, Pakistan). A part of the total of the 400 000 Euro grant is also dedicated to student and researcher exchanges. The project website is currently under construction and is available here.

Publications by Members of the Department

• Tamara Rathcke’s team has published a new paper on the speech-to-song illusion: Smit, E. A., & Rathcke, T. V. (2024). Beyond musical training: Individual influences on the perception of the speech-to-song illusion. Psychology of Music
   
• Georg A. Kaiser & Klaus von Heusinger. On the emergence of argument encoding in causative constructions in Romance. In: J. Casalicchio & P. Herbeck (eds.). “New Perspectives on the Syntax of Causative and Restructuring Verbs in Romance. Special Issue of Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics” 10(4)/2, 1–34. (online access)
   
• Abdul Khaliq, Mohammed, Frassinelli, Diego and Sabine Schulte im Walde, Comparison of Image Generation Models for Abstract and Concrete Event Descriptions, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang) @ NAACL 2024, Association for Computational Linguistics. (to appear)
   
• Jang, Hyewon  & Diego Frassinelli, Generalizable Sarcasm Detection is Just Around the Corner, of Course!, Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2024). (to appear)
   
• Jang, Hyewon, Jakob, Moritz and Diego Frassinelli, Context vs. Human Disagreement in Sarcasm Detection, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (Figlang) @ NAACL 2024, Association for Computational Linguistics. (to appear)
   
• Marina Rossi has her first PhD article accepted for a publication in “Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal”. - Rossi, M., Smit, E.A., van der Werff, J., Ravignani, A., Rathcke, T. (2024). Testing Rhythmic Abilities in Developmental Dyslexia: Is Internal Rhythm Generation Intact? “Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal”. The expected publication date is December 2024.
   
• Tamara Rathcke and her team published a paper in a Springer Nature journal. Rathcke, T., Smit, E., Zheng, Y. et al. Perception of temporal structure in speech is influenced by body movement and individual beat perception ability. “Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics“ (2024). (online access)

Acquisitions of the Library

• Genova, Kristina: Effects of the second language on the first
• CüCü, Hatice: Family language policy: Turkish in Germany
• Grenzdörffer, Astrid Farai: Handling monotonic and non-monotonic semantic content in XLE+Glue : unraveling the complexity of anaphoric mechnanisms
• Bovatekin, Hülya Safak: The impact of gender and age on motivation for learning English as a second language
• Teniaeva, Anastasiia: Verbalaspekt bei deutsch-russischen Bilingualen aus 3 Generationen
• Limper, Juliane: Regionalsprachliche Spektren im Bairischen
• Zehentner, Eva: Competition in Language Change: The Rise of the English Dative Alternation
• Nevalainen, Terttu: Historical sociolinguistics: language change in Tudor and Stuart England
• Fuentes Rodríguez, Catalina: Macrosintaxis del español
• Potowski, Kim: The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language
• Applied linguistics/publ. in coop. with AAAL American Association for Applied Linguistics; AILA International Association of Applied Linguistics; BAAL British Association for Applied Linguistics; Volume 44 (2023)
• Italian journal of linguistics; Volume 34 (2022)
• Journal of English and Germanic philology; Volume 122 (2023)
• Language, cognition and neuroscience; Volume 38
• Moderne Sprachen; 64 (2020)
• Journal of Germanic linguistics; Volume 34
• Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie; Band 142 (2023)
• Le français préclassique/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut National de la Langue Française, Centre d'Études Lexicologiques et Lexicographiques des XVIe et XVIIe Siècles; 23, 24 and 25
• The French review/publ. by the American Association of Teachers of French; Volume 96 (2022/2023)
• Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies/University of London: Volume 86 (2023)
• Journal of the American Oriental Society: Volume 143 (2023)

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