Programm StuTS 69 + TaCoS 2021

Pubquiz

To kick off our conference we're hosting a half linguistic, half non-linguistic pub quiz for you. You'll participate in spontaneously formed teams in order to win knowledge and entertainment.

Greeting and gathertown briefing - Willkommen und gathertown-Einweisung

We're going to give you a short introduction to the team like asking questions, moving through crowds, private spaces, the conference office, where to find further instructions at all times and more,

Lektionen aus vier Jahrzehnten Linguistik: Sprachvergleich und technische Terminologie

In diesem informellen Vortrag werde ich auf meinen eigenen Werdegang zurückblicken und das mit einer überraschenden Schlussfolgerung verbinden: die technische Terminologie der Grammatik ist wichtiger, als viele Leute denken. Man kann zwischen zwei Forschungsstrategien unterscheiden, einer argumentierenden und einer hypothesentestenden. Für die letztere braucht man gut verstandene Termini, was ich erst nach drei Jahrzehnten im Linguistik-Betrieb besser verstanden habe.

Acoustics of the collapsing ATR harmony in Igbo

In this talk author aims to describe the state of an asymmetric ATR harmony system of Igbo (/i ɪ u ʊ e o ɔ a/) in reflection of various acoustic metrics (F1, A1-A2, A1-A3, H1-A3, deltaB1, CoG) analyzed via Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2017) and thus c...

Like many of West African languages, Igbo requires vowel harmony based on the feature advanced tongue root, or ATR. The vowel system in this case contains two sets of phonemes, which differ in pairs only by the value of this feature.
The harmony system in Igbo is unusual for Benue-Congolese languages. Eight phonemes /i ɪ u ʊ e o ɔ a/ are in pairs opposed to each other in traditional descriptions (Emenajo 1967), however, from typological point of view, the system is asymmetrical both in high/low and front/back dimensions. Height-asymmetric ATR systems are common in West Africa, but of 44 Benue-Congolese languages, only one has an /i ɪ u ʊ e o a/ system, where harmony collapse began within height 2 (2014).
The ATP feature itself is still poorly studied from the point of view of articulation and acoustics (nonetheless, Edmondson & Esling 2006, Esling et al. 2019). In this work, we investigate the acoustic parameters, which have shown themselves as correlates of ATR contrast (Fulop et al. 1998, Guion et al. 2004, Olejarczuk et al. 2019), on the data of an asymmetric and, according to our assumption, decreasing Igbo vowel system.
The author aims to describe the state of an asymmet...

A disruptive energy: Questions and answers in the direct speech of The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

This paper is a linguistic stylistic analysis of the questions and answers in the direct speech of Muriel Spark's novella "The Driver's Seat" (1970). The theoretical framework is based in pragmatics, i.e. in adjacency pairs and Grice's Cooperative...

V1 in Lopit

Based on the paper published by Bossi & Diercks (2019) on Kipsigis, I present an analysis of basic syntactic structures in Lopit, an Eastern-Nilotic V1 language.

Madeline Bossi and Michael Diercks designed a syntactic analysis of V1 in Kipsigis, a Southern Nilotic language, in their 2019 paper. It specifically includes an additional projection αP between CP and TP, as originally introduced by Miyagawa (2010) for Japanese. I show that basic syntactic structures in Lopit, an Eastern Nilotic language, can be analysed in a similar way, if some necessary adjustments are made. I develop the basic structure further to be able to derive focus and prominence phenomena, as well as interrogative structures.

References:
Bossi, Madeline and Michael Diercks (2019): ‘V1 in Kipsigis: Head movementand discourse-based scrambling’, Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1).
Moodie, Jonathan Paul (2019): A Grammar of the Lopit Language. PhD thesis,University of Melbourne.
Adger, David (2003): Core syntax: A minimalist approach. Vol. 20, Oxford University Press Oxford.

Orientations and Motivations of Arabic Learners in Jordan

What are the reasons and motivations for studying Arabic in Jordan? Is there a difference between those who study colloquial Jordanian Arabic and those who study Modern Standard Arabic? In my master thesis, I examined these questions using a mixed...

Motivation plays a major role in foreign language acquisition as many studies state that motivation is the most important and most influential aspect in learning a foreign language. However, a considerable amount of literature published about motivation in foreign language acquisition has been about English as a foreign language and has tended to geographically focus on East Asia, the United States, and Europe. The aim of this study is to investigate motivations and orientations (i.e., reasons, interests, and attitudes) of non-native Arabic learners in Jordan. Moreover, a comparison between learners of colloquial Jordanian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic in terms of orientations and motivations is made. In this study, a mixed methods study was conducted. The mixed methodology approach consisted of four interviews (qualitative method) and an online survey (quantitative method), in which 105 participants took part. The descriptive statistical analysis of the survey data was calculated and evaluated with RStudio.
Results show that the mere interest in Arabic, Arabic culture, and in languages in general play a decisive role in studying Arabic as a foreign language. Moreover, orie...

The Psychology of a Language Learner: The Out-Turn of 'Self-Motivation' on a Learner's Linguistic Self-Competence

This poster presentation offers to throw light on the essence of motivation and mainly ‘self-motivation’ as a catalyst to reach linguistic self-confidence and therefore self-competence in linguistic communication. This quantitative research scenar...

People always quote, “We are all the same.” Is this really the case? For us human beings, are we really the same with no slight difference? When we say “same”, it is about the way we communicate, our etiquette, our lifestyle, and our emotions as well. This quote is just flawed in a specific perspective, especially when we examine our way of learning language and how we get motivated and most importantly, motivate ourselves; we are the opposite of the same! For this purpose, it becomes a major essentiality to inspect or investigate the theoretical anatomy of “motivation” in second language acquisition and learning. This poster presentation offers to throw light on the essence of motivation and mainly ‘self-motivation’ as a catalyst to reach linguistic self-confidence and therefore self-competence in linguistic communication. This quantitative research scenario examined the contribution of Egyptian EFL learners’ motivation, self-motivation, and linguistic self-confidence in their proficiency, as well as language-use anxiety to their willingness to communicate (WTC) level, along with a minor possible impact of age and gender on the learners’ reported L2 WTC. 50 university students ...

Verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese

In Mandarin Chinese, verbs (kan `look’) can be reduplicated (kan-kan `look-look’) to express a delimitative aspectual meaning, namely that the event denoted by the verb happens in a short duration and/or a low frequency (kan-kan `look a little bit...

Arcodia, Giorgio Francesco, Bianca Basciano, and Chiara Melloni (2014). Verbal Reduplication in Sinitic. In Augendre Sandra, Couasnon-Torlois Graziella, Lebon Déborah, Clément Michard, Boyé Gilles, and Montermini Fabio (Eds.), Proceedings of the Décembrettes 8th International conference on morphology, Bordeaux, pp. 15–45. Carnets De Grammaire, CLLE-ERSS 22.
Basciano, Bianca and Chiara Melloni (2017). Event delimitation in Mandarin: The case of diminishing reduplication. Italian Journal of Linguistics 29(1), 143–166.
Chao, Yuen Ren (1968). A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ghomeshi, Jila, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell (2004). Contrastive focus reduplication in english (the salad-salad paper). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22(2), 307–357.
Huang, C.-T. James, Y.-H. Audrey Li, and Yafei Li (2009). The Syntax of Chinese. Cambridge Syntax Guides. Cambridge University Press.
Jackendoff, Ray (1997). The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, Ray (2002). Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. URL https://oxford.universitypress...

Yoga

Dem Suppenkoma entkommen: Im blauen Raum wartet eine belebende Yoga-Session auf dich zum Kraft tanken und wach werden.

The instructions in German, but you’re of course welcome to try it with just the help of Copying and Movement.

Copies and Language: Insigts from Computational Linguistics

In this talk I show how computational linguistics generates accessible linguistic research questions, the answers to which have the potential to refute popular linguistic theories. Constructions which require grammatical identity ('copy construct...

„Böhmisch erwünscht“?!

Das ehemalige Kronland Österreich unter der Enns, heute Niederösterreich, wurde historisch meist als einsprachig dargestellt. Ein Grund dafür war, dass nur das Deutsche als offizielle Landessprache anerkannt war. Wie präsent allerdings auch andere...

Comprehension of gender-neutral forms and the pseudo-generic masculine in German: a visual world eye-tracking study

Gender-inclusive language has evolved into a much-debated topic during the past years, discussed interdisciplinarily from theoretical to psycholinguistics, sociology, and economy – and by anyone who uses language.

Studies on German that primari...

The talk will give an overview of the experimental method used as well as task and design. When discussing results, I am going to refer to a rather advanced tool for statistical analysis, but keep it comprehensible.

Vorstellung der German Society for Computational Linguistics (GSCL)

This presentations gives a short introduction on the German Society for Computational Linguistics, which fosters research and networking in the area of natural language processing in the German-speaking countries. Join our meeting to learn more ab...

Die Gesellschaft für Sprachtechnologie und Computerlinguistik e.V. (GSCL) ist der wissenschaftliche Fachverband in den deutschsprachigen Ländern und Regionen für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung in Forschung, Lehre und Beruf. Sie ist aktiv um Verbindungen zwischen Hochschulen und Industrie bemüht und unterstützt die Zusammenarbeit mit Nachbardisziplinen und unterhält Kontakte zu den entsprechenden Fachverbänden.
Seit 2021 bieten wir eine kostenlose Mitgliedschaft für Studierende und Doktoranden an. Es finden monatliche virtuelle Events für alle Mitglieder (z.B. Tutorials oder Research Talks) statt. Mehr Infos hier: https://gscl.org/de/

International Linguistics Networking

Following up on the discussion of international collaboration of language and linguistics students at the last StuTS, this event is aimed at presenting the International Association of Language and Linguistics Students (IALS), which is to be found...

Hobnob

You will meet some new friends today! How do we know? Well, there will be a great hobnob in the lounge this evening for you to mingle, meet old and new aquaintances and have a great time. (Bringing your own drinks is highly advisable.)

Engagement with classical literature in the framework of a Citizen Science project using translation alignment

The engagement of citizens in research projects, including in the Digital Humanities, has risen in prominence in recent years. However, that research is mostly limited to data enrichment and data quality assurance, while the pedagogical effectiveness of this type of engagement, which leads to corpus enrichment via different types of annotations, is still under-researched, despite its capability for incidental learning. Translation alignment is one task that has considerable potential for data enrichment while providing pedagogical benefits.
This presentation showcases both of above-named aspects of user engagement in a Citizen Science project, in which the task of word level alignment of classical Persian with its German translation was assigned through two experiments. The findings, which will be presented in this talk, illustrate the way in which an appropriate infrastructure and scaffolding for the alignment process can not only increase use engagement and user motivation by being pedagogically beneficial but also shows the efficiency of data enrichment in the framework of a Citizen Science project.

(Un)marked Gender in German

In this talk I want to show that a standard assumption about markedness can't be applied to German as easy as it might seem: masculine gender is unmarked in most languages that distinguish a masculine and a feminine gender.
Some data from differ...

This talk is going to present the concept of markedness in the domain of phi-features. A common assumption about markedness in the domain of gender is, that in all languages that distinguish a masculine from a feminine gender, the masculine gender is less marked. Challenging this statement I want to propose the question if there even is a single unmarked gender category for all German nouns.
Some diagnostics for marked and unmarked categories from semantic and morphological points of view will be shown, mostly based on Greenberg (1980) and Sauerland (2008).
Applying these diagnostics to different domains of German nouns (human denoting nouns, kinship terms and animal denoting nouns) it can be seen that there doesn't seem to be a coherently unmarked gender category across the considered German noun classes.
Following a distributed morphology approach I want to introduce the assumption of gender features being located at a head called little n and the notion of interpretable and uninterpretable gender features, following Kramer (2015). Within this framework I want to present a markedness scale possibly explaining the mixed picture that is visible for the different domains of ...

Prosody and chunking

This talk will be a work-in-progress report of my MA thesis dealing with how prosody relates to and informs chunking phenomena. Even though prosodic features, such as intonation, pauses and stress, naturally group items together in spoken language...

A study of [unless X] in contemporary English

This study analyzes the construction [unless X] as based on the Construction Grammar framework (cf. FILLMORE et al., 1988; GOLDBERG, 1995, 2006; BYBEE, 2016), in association with the Corpus Linguistics (McENERY; HARDIE, 2013; SINCLAIR, 2005) metho...

Fremdes in der Wortbildung

Während das Eindringen fremder Wörter in die deutsche Sprache nicht nur von sogenannten SprachpflegerInnen stets mit Argwohn betrachtet wird, sondern auch ein häufig zu beobachtendes Phänomen ist, ist die Übernahme fremder Wortbildungselemente wei...

Between Past Participle Agreement and Clitic Doubling in Spanish

In this talk, I will compare two different phenomena of agreement with direct objects in diachronic data of Spanish. I focus on Past Participle Agreement in Old Spanish (see Macpherson 1967) and Clitic Doubling in Argentinean Spanish, especially S...

In this talk, I will compare two different phenomena of agreement with direct objects in diachronic data of Spanish. I focus on Past Participle Agreement in Old Spanish (1) and Clitic Doubling in Argentinean Spanish (2), especially Spanish of Buenos Aires.

(1) Old Spanish – 12th century (“Auto de los Reyes Magos” 1965,146; cited after Macpherson 1967)
no la auemos usada
‚we have not used it (fem.)’

(2) Modern Spanish of Buenos Aires (Zdrojewski & Sánchez 2014:164)
las saludé a las maestras del jardín
‘I greeted the teachers (fem.) from the kindergarten’

Past Participle Agreement is the agreement between the past participle like “usada” in (1) and the direct object, here the pronoun “la” (both [+fem.] and [+sg.]. Clitic Doubling is a phenomenon where the object, “las maestras del jardín” in (2), and the clitic pronoun for the same object, “las” in (2), occur in the same sentence. They also show agreement, here: [+fem.] and [+pl.] for both.
For the analysis, the concept of grammaticalization following Lehmann (2002) and language data of research on Past Participle Agreement in Old Spanish (see Macpherson 1967) and Clitic Doubling in Modern Argentinean Spanish (see...

From Pronouns to Copulas in Aramaic

This talk will explore the grammaticalization of first and second person pronouns into copulas in Aramaic, a branch of the Semitic language family. It will provide an account for the development of person-specific and bound copula forms (also know...

The Aramaic languages have copulas that grammaticalized from pronouns (pronominal copulas) like most other Semitic languages. In a seminar article Li & Thompson (1977) argued that third person pronouns grammaticalize into copulas via so-called topic-comment constructions of the type “Nöldeke – he was a Semitist”. However, many Aramaic languages also have copulas derived from first and second person pronouns. In this talk I will argue that the account by Li & Thompson is not applicable to such copulas and that they instead developed in simple nominal clauses as a kind of nonverbal indexing, similar to verbal indexes. This approach is based on the accessibility account by Ariel (2000). The talk presents the findings from my Master’s thesis in General Linguistics “Grammaticization of pronominal copulas in Aramaic”.
Literature:
Ariel, Mira. 2000. The development of person agreement markers: from pronouns to higher accessibility markers. In Michael Barlow & Suzanne Kemmer (eds.), Usage-based Models of Language, 197–260. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publ.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2013. Argument indexing: a conceptual framework for the syntactic status of bound person forms. In Dik Ba...

Other: Offenes Lesen - Märchenstunde

[English below]
Wir wollen zusammen Texte auf verschiedene Weisen (vor-)lesen, z.B. in Regionalsprache, mit ungewöhnlichen Stimmen oder auf verschiedenen Sprachen. Die Texte waren anfangs Märchen, aber bei vergangenen StuTSen haben wir auch Theat...

Welsh Workshop

The workshop is aimed at participants who know of Welsh, but have never been in the position to familiarise themselves with that Insular Celtic language.
The goal is, therefore, to hint at some major differences between Welsh and Germanic or othe...

lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks at school - Didactics and curricula

This workshop will provide a space for discussions and ideas about teaching linguistics in schools. We will first hear a 15-minute input in which we'll look at Onur's current experiences with teaching a linguistics class in a German high school. W...

Python for Linguists

Python is an easy to learn programming language with a ton of tools for linguistic research, from simple string manipulation and data cleaning, to more advanced parsers and complex statistical algorithms. We will go over the basics of Python's fea...

Python is an easy to learn programming language with a ton of tools for linguistic research, from simple string manipulation and data cleaning, to more advanced parsers and complex statistical algorithms. We will go over the basics of Python's features, look at Spacy and Numpy/Scipy and finally go through an example project. Some basic programming knowledge is advisory, but not strictly necessary to follow along.
The material for the workshop will be made available here shortly before.

Statistics with R

Welcome to our introduction to the world of statistics for linguists. This workshop is targeted at students of linguistics with no prior knowledge of statistics, who would like to use modern quantitative research methods in their own work. Whether...

In this workshop, we will focus on the following statistical tests: correlation analyses and t-tests. We will show you when to use which test, what requirements to check for, and how to run the appropriate test, once you are sure it’s the one.

We will provide you with sample data, but if you have data from your own project, feel free to bring it along to play around with. For the practical parts, we would advise you to have either RStudio or SPSS on your computer. Ideally, try opening a file in whatever programme you choose to work with before the workshop and get yourself aquainted with the layout of the programme.

A big part of the workshop will be for your own projects and questions. If you are planning to run an experiment or analyse someone else's data and don't know where to start, feel free to bring all your uncertainties to the table! If you feel like your question is too complicated for spontaneous discussion, you are welcome to email us before the workshop to give us some time to prepare.

(Note: We will not teach you how to use these programmes in general but rather show how to run particular tests in them.)

Emotional Prosody Perception

Emotional prosody is an important part of speech as it allows us to convey our affective state to listeners. However, the perception of emotional prosody underlies several factors and is not universal to all speakers, listeners, and emotions. Whil...

Diagnosing verb stranding verb phrase ellipsis in Kiswahili

This talk aims to provide an account for analysing Kiswahili object gaps as verb
stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VSVPE). Different tests are used that have been shown to be
characteristic for verb phrase ellipsis (VPE). In particular, other anal...

The focus of this talk lies on Kiswahili object gaps. In these constructions the clause is lacking an object and crucially needs an antecedent clause to be licensed. In previous literature this has been analysed as verb stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VSVPE). For VSVPE to be available, the verb escapes the to be elided VP, via head movement. Thus, when the VP is elided, the verb stays stranded in a higher position. The result is a sentence lacking the object, hence the name object gap. The problem with VSVPE accounts is that they are difficult to differentiate from simple argument drop or argument ellipsis accounts, because the surface forms are identical. This talk tests the availability of VSVPE in Kiswahili. Crucially I show, that neither argument drop nor argument ellipsis can explain all the available data and VSVPE is necessary.

Yoga

Langer Tag? Im blauen Raum wartet eine entspannende Yoga-Session auf dich zum Runterkommen und Entspannen.

The instructions will be in German, but you’re of course welcome to try it with just the help of your mirror neurons.

Game Night

Gather with others to play game classics like skribbl.io (Montagsmaler), Codenames and Sudoku, but also hidden gems like Set. You can even play free form games where you need to use your 🌈imgaination and be creative.

Attitudinal object control predicates

The notion of control refers to referential dependencies between an argument of the matrix clause and the covert subject of an infinite clause as complement or adjunct. The cases I will consider in my talk are control relations between the object (= controller) of certain clause-embedding predicates and the covert subject (= controllee) of an infinitival complement (e.g. Mary asked John [ _ to mow the lawn].). Whereas many syntactic accounts were primarily concerned with the status and analysis of the covert embedded subject/controllee (e.g., as an empty category such as PRO or as a trace) and syntactic mechanisms of controller choice (e.g. object control with ask, subject control with promise), recent proposals (Pearson 2013, 2016, Landau 2015) have shed new light on another important distinction in control: control predicates that only allow exhaustive control readings (e.g., verbs such as manage allow only readings with the referential identity of controller and controllee) and those that also allow partial control readings, for instance in combination with collective predicates such as gather: John wanted [ _ to gather in front of the Town Hall]; here, the controllee include...

Linguistic Complexity as an Indicator of Writing Quality

This work examines correlations between measures of linguistic complexity and writing quality in eighth-grade students' persuasive essays from the ASAP dataset. These correlations can indicate useful features for automated essay scoring, and contr...

The development of writing skills is essential to success in many areas, both in education and the workplace (McNamara et al., 2010). Despite their importance, these skills are slow to develop, and generally of a low standard (Ferretti and Graham, 2019). This work explores the relationship between linguistic complexity and writing quality in persuasive essays written by eighth-grade students. More specifically, the study aims to identify correlates of awarded essay grade among various measures of syntactic and lexical complexity. Understanding the linguistic features that correlate with writing quality could find application in areas such as personalized pedagogical feedback and the development of automated essay scoring systems (McNamara et al., 2014; Kumar and Boulanger, 2020). With these applications in mind, the set of essays was partitioned into 3 groups: high, medium, and low quality, based on the essays’ grades. As a result, characteristics of essays belonging to specific groups should emerge, highlighting areas for specific improvement in low-quality essays, and features to be emulated in high-quality essays.

Many measures of syntactic complexity were ca...

„… meine Aepfel will ich schon los werden …“

Der Vortrag kann online unter https://bit.ly/wollen-Futur nachgeschaut werden!

„Nun, wenn Ihr nicht wollt, sagte die Bäuerin, kann ich euch nicht zwingen, meine Aepfel will ich schon los werden [...].“

In diesem exemplarischen Satz aus „Sneewittchen“ in Grimms „Kinder- und Hausmärchen“ von 1812 erscheint „wollen“ in Kombination mit dem Infinitiv funktionsanalog zu „werden“, das nach traditioneller Grammatikschreibung im Deutschen das Futur bildet.

Der Vortrag will der Frage nachgehen, wie ein solches „wollen-Futur“ beschrieben werden könnte. Dabei soll das Phänomen zunächst anhand eines knappen synchronen Vergleichs mit anderen germanischen Sprachen konturiert und hinsichtlich seiner grammatikalischen Beschreibung problematisiert werden.

Die dabei getroffenen Beobachtungen sind anschließend diachron nachzuvollziehen, indem – nach einem kurzen Blick auf frühneuzeitliche Sprachlehrwerke – vorliegende Studien für das Frühneu- (Bogner 1989) und Mittelhochdeutsche (Pfefferkorn 2005) ausgewertet und aufs Althochdeutsche ausgeweitet werden.

Insgesamt zeigt sich v.a. ein Zusammenhang des Gebrauchs von „wollen“ mit der grammatischen Kategorie Person. Da dieser Befund mit der Grammatikalisierungshypothese schwierig zu vereinbaren ist, soll zunächst das ...

A pragmatic approach to functional restrictions in reportative evidentials

Some languages, in particular Cuzco Quechua (as reported by Faller, 2002), have available quotative readings for these hearsay evidentials, which specify their semantics into something that glosses as "Someone said: "P"", hence effectively quoting...

In the formal semantics literature, there has been a line of fruitful work which
aims to model evidential markers as illocutionary force operators (Faller, 2002, 2006;
Murray, 2006, 2016; Korotkova, 2016). Recently, there have been attempts to formally
describe linguistically diverse, overt evidential markers and accurately derive their
meanings. Among these, quotative readings of hearsay reportative evidentials, most
notably in Cuzco Quechua (Faller, 2002; Korotkova, 2016) have been discussed. These
readings, first observed by Faller (2002), generate what Korotkova (2017;685) calls a
“’someone said’ effect” in the gloss. That is, a canonical interpretation of the hearsay
evidential (glossed in English as “It is said that P”) can be ambiguously interpreted as
quotative (as in a sentence of the form “Someone said: ‘P’”).
It has come under the attention of such authors that the availability of these
readings is strikingly rare cross-linguistically, as, to date, they have been attested in
only seven, mostly unrelated languages (Korotkova, 2017). This posits, at the very
minimum, a typological question: why should this reading unavailability tend to be the
case in natu...

Mixed syntactic categories: The case of Russian numerals

Mixed syntactic categories are those syntactic units that exhibit the behavior of two or more "classical" syntactic categories in different environments.

Russian numerals exhibit different agreement behavior when combined with nouns. This behavior is dependent on numeral and the case. Thus, Russian numerals can exhibit either more noun-like or adjective-like behavior. To analyze them, I used a formalism proposed by Bas Arts (2007) called syntactic gradience, which aims to describe mixed syntactic categories, like Russian numerals or English gerund.

NLMaps

NLMaps is the Natural Language Interface for OpenStreetMap I built for my Master’s thesis. Users can issue queries like “Where can I find vegan food near Moritzbastei in Leipzig?” and the answer is retrieved from OpenStreetMap and shown on a map.
...

Grammatikalisierung in Amazonien

Vorgestellt wird eine Studie zur Entstehung von Grammatik in Amazonassprachen. Über 200 Fälle von Grammatikalisierung aus 30 genetisch diversen Sprachen des Amazonasbeckens wurden gesammelt, darunter die Entstehung von neun Futurgrammemen. Diese S...

208 Grammatikalisierungspfade wurden aus den Grammatiken von 30 genetisch diversen Amazonassprachen herausgearbeitet. Als Grammatikalisierungspfad verstehe ich hier die Entwicklung von einem lexikalischen zu einem grammatischen Element (oder einem schwächer grammatischen zu einem stärker grammatischen Element), wobei die Ausgangs- und die Zielkonstruktion und deren wichtigste Eigenschaften betrachtet werden.
In Anlehnung an ein Modell von Bisang et al. (2020) werden diesen Eigenschaften numerische Werte zugeordnet, die eine quantitative Analyse möglich machen sollen. Im Fokus stehen die Abstraktheit (bzw. semantische Komplexität) und die Länge (bzw. phonetische Masse) der Konstruktion.
Ein Vergleich zwischen den Makroarealen Südamerika, Afrika und Eurasien hat Unterschiede und Ähnlichkeiten in den Grammatikalisierungspfaden und deren Charakter aufgezeigt. Interessanterweise sind nach dieser Analyse Eurasien und Südamerika ähnlicher als Afrika und Südamerika.
Das Fallbeispiel Futur zeigt vor allem, aus welchen Quellbereichen Futurmarker rekrutiert werden. Typisch sind hier vor allem Bewegungsausdrücke und modale Ausdrücke. Aber es gibt auch andere Fälle – gewisse Berühmtheit e...

Yoga

Dem Suppenkoma entkommen: Im blauen Raum wartet eine belebende Yoga-Session auf dich zum Kraft tanken und wach werden.
Ich dachte, es ist vielleicht seltsam, wenn die Beschreibung auf Englisch wäre, weil das Yoga-Angebot ja auf Deutsch stattfinde...

The instructions will be in German, but you’re of course welcome to try it with just the help of your mirror neurons.

Fieldwork in Generative Linguistics

One of the major goals of linguistic theory is to account for attested grammars, and at the same time rule out impossible grammars. In order to achieve this goal, we need accurate generalizations about what is (im)possible cross-linguistically, wh...

Einführung in das Baskische und das Baskenland

! Diese Einführung geht 2 Stunden.

In dieser Einführung lernt ihr das Baskische, eine isolierte Sprache Nordostspaniens und Südwestfrankreichs, kennen. Es wird Einblicke in die Region, die Geschichte der Sprecher und die wichtigsten Wissenschaf...

Irish Workshop

An introduction to the history, status and basic grammar of the Irish language. We will look at sentence structure, vocabulary and phrases.

Annual General Meeting Junge Sprachwissenschaft e.V.

- The language of the session will be decided upon at the meeting, depending on who is there -

We are excited to invite all those interested to join the annual general member meeting of the Association for Young Linguistics (Junge Sprachwissens...

- Sprache wird in Abhängigkeit der Anwesenden in der Sitzung entschieden -

Wir laden alle Interessierten herzlich zur Jahreshauptversammlung des Vereins Junge Sprachwissenschaft e.V. ein.

Bei diesem Treffen informieren wir euch über vergangene und laufende Projekte. Außerdem wird der neue Vorstand (2021-24) gewählt. Die (Selbst-)Nominierungsphase läuft noch - meldet euch also gerne, wenn ihr Interesse an einer der Vorstandsrollen habt!

Die Vereinssitzung ist auch für (noch) nicht-Mitglieder eine gute Gelegenheit die Projekte kennenzulernen und in die Vereinsarbeit einzusteigen. Nur Mitglieder sind in den formellen Wahlen und Abstimmungen stimmberechtigt.

### Was macht eigentlich dieser Verein?
Der Verein Junge Sprachwissenschaft e.V. fördert die Vernetzung junger Sprachwissenschaftler:innen untereinander, sowie den Austausch zwischen sprachwissenschaftlichen und angrenzenden Fachdisziplinen. Zusätzlich fördern wir das Bewusstsein für den Umgang mit und das Verständnis von Sprache in der Gesellschaft.

Dazu unterstützen wir die Organisationsteams der StuTS mit Rat und Tat und engagieren uns das restliche Jahr in verschiedenen Projekten. Möchtest du über linguist...

Game Night

Gather with others to play game classics like skribbl.io (Montagsmaler), Codenames and Sudoku, but also hidden gems like Set. You can even play free form games where you need to use your 🌈imgaination and be creative.

Algorithms for the Manipulation of Writing Style

Language Learning Motivation of Flemish Secondary-School Students

Master thesis presentation. How motivated are Flemish students to learn German and English in secondary school? How is this motivation influenced by gender and SES? Which other factors are at play? A quantitative analysis.

Polish Morphosyntactic Tagging with a LatticeLSTM Architecture

Morphosyntactic tagging is the task of choosing the correct morphosyntactic analysis for a text. The input to a morphosyntactic tagger are all possible analyses of the given text, for example using a rule-based morphological analyzer. Morfeusz 2 (...

References:
Matthias Sperber, Graham Neubig, Jan Niehues, Alex Waibel. 2017. Neural lattice-to-sequence models for uncertain inputs. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1380–1389, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Marcin Woliński. 2014. Morfeusz reloaded. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2014), pages 1106-1111, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Languages Resources Association (ELRA).

The Indo-European Background of the Slavic Uni-directional and Multi-directional Verbs of Motion

The Slavic languages distinguish two types of verbs of motion — uni-directional and multi-directional. The aim of this research is to find out their Indo-European background, i.e. the etymology. It will also give an insight into the Indo-European ...

The Slavic languages distinguish two types of verbs of motion — uni-directional and multi-directional (also referred to as determined and undetermined), e.g. OCS iti/xoditi 'go', nesti/nositi 'carry', where iti and nesti are uni-directional and xoditi as well as nositi are multi-directional. These two types of verbs are used in distinct situations.

The aim of this research should be to find out their Indo-European background. 14 pairs of such verbs of motion from Russian are taken into etymological examination. The results show that in most cases, the multi-directional verbs trace back to the Indo-European ablauted o-grade causative-iterative formation, while some others show the Slavic innovation with the same iterative meaning, and in one single case (the morphology of Russian ездить 'to drive, to go by vehicle', multi-directional counterpart of ехать, same meaning) is still problematic. A stem suppletion is also to be found in идти/ходить 'to go on foot'.

The nature of this research will give the opportunity to have an short "excursion" to the world of Indo-European and Slavic verbal morphology.

Das Medienformat Reiseblog: funktional, stilistisch und multimodal

Aufgrund der Globalisierung und Digitalisierung ist die Welt zu einem »globalen Dorf« geworden. Das Verreisen ist in Mode. Zudem erfreut sich das Internet großen Zuspruchs, denn die Reisenden bedienen sich nicht mehr nur der (gedruckten) Reiseführ...

In der modernen Gesellschaft sind wir Zeugen zwei immer bedeutenderen Phänomenen – der Globalisierung und der Digitalisierung, aufgrund welcher die Welt zu einem »globalen Dorf« geworden ist. Das Verreisen kommt in Mode. Zudem erfreut sich das Internet großen Zuspruchs, denn die Reisenden bedienen sich nicht mehr nur der (gedruckten) Reiseführer, sondern informieren sich über ihre Reiseziele auch im Web. Mehrere erstellen – aus Liebe zum Reisen oder als Einkommensquelle – ihre eigene Webseite und veröffentlichen darauf Reiseblogs.
Diese Thematik ist in ein umfangreicheres Forschungsprojekt eingebettet, in dem deutsche Reiseblogs aus text- und medienlinguistischer sowie multimodaler Perspektive untersucht werden. Im Vortrag sollen zunächst die theoretischen Grundlagen für die geplante Dissertation kurz beschrieben werden. Anschließend sollen die Ergebnisse einer Fallstudie am Beispiel des deutschen Reiseblogs „We travel the World“ der Blogger Caro und Martin präsentiert werden.
Im Rahmen des theoretischen Teils der im Vortrag zu präsentierenden Fallstudie sollen zunächst die Hauptmerkmale der Kommunikation im digitalen Zeitalter sowie der Begriff Text in Zeiten von Web 2.0 und...

Aber weshalb muss ich denn dieses Wort lernen?

Jeder erinnert sich gewiss das Pauken. Wie wichtig Wörter auch sind, Vokabeln lernen ist nicht immer einfach. Manchmal gibt es seltsame Wörter in diesen Listen, von denen man denkt: weshalb muss ich gerade das eigentlich lernen? Ob der angebotene ...

Die theoretische Grundlage ist in drei Gegenständen gegliedert. Zum ersten dreht es um was es bedeutet, ein Wort zu kennen, und wie Spracherwerb der erste Sprache und der Fremdsprache sich voneinander unterscheiden (Milton, 2013 und Meara, 1987). Zweitens dreht es um die Bestimmung eines Kernwortschatzes. Viele Wissenschaftler haben unterschiedliche Standpunkte, wo die Grenze des Kernwortschatzes liegt, oder ob es tatsächlich einen Kernwortschatz gibt (u.a. Scharloth, 2016 und Tschirner, 2006). Auch die Theorie hinter dem Frequenzwörterbuch wird hier erörtert. Drittens gibt es eine Fokussierung auf den heutigen Stand des Wortschatzerwerb im heutigen Unterricht, wobei sowohl der Mangel an gediegene Forschungen nach der zu lernen Wörtern, als die problematische restringiert und isoliert angebotene Vokabeln vorkommen (Häcker 2008).

Literaturverzeichnis.
Häcker, Martina (2008): Eleven pets and 20 ways to express one's opinion: the vocabulary learners of German acquire at English secondary schools. In: Language Learning Journal, 36 (2), 215-226, DOI: 10.1080/09571730802393183.
Hulstijn, Jan (2012): Woorden leren: een kwestie van aandacht en herhaling. In: Levende Talen Magazine ...

DURel Annotation Tool

DURel is an annotation tool for sentence pairs of a word. The annotations are used to form sense clusters of a word and to visualize them over time.

We present an online annotation interface for sentence pairs of a word. Annotators are asked to judge the degree of semantic relatedness of pairs of word uses, such as the two uses of arm in (1) and (2) on a scale of 1 (unrelated) to 4 (identical).

(1) and taking a knife from her pocket, she opened a vein in her little arm, and dipping a feather in the blood, wrote something on a piece of white cloth, which was spread before her.

(2) It stood behind a high brick wall, its back windows overlooking an arm of the sea which, at low tide, was a black and stinking mud-flat

The annotated data of a word is then represented in a Word Usage Graph (WUG), where nodes represent word uses and weights on edges represent the (median) semantic relatedness judgment of a pair of uses as e.g. (1) and (2). The final WUGs are clustered with a variation of correlation clustering and split into subgraphs representing nodes and edges from different time periods. Clusters are then interpreted as word senses and changes in clusters over time as lexical semantic change.

The interface allows users to upload a project, i.e., us...

Contact-Induced Language Change in Azerbaijani Relative Clauses

Yoga

Dem Suppenkoma entkommen: Im blauen Raum wartet eine belebende Yoga-Session auf dich zum Kraft tanken und wach werden.

The instructions will be in German, but you’re of course welcome to try it with just the help of your mirror neurons.

Anglophone Cultural Domination and Teaching Interculturality in EFL

One manifestation of Southern spaces’ postcolonial malaise is their linguistic dependency on other international languages. This presentation recognizes Morocco as a Southern space whose linguistic situation is dominated by foreign languages. In particular, as Morocco has been trying to overcome its postcolonial positionality that is characterized by the supremacy of the French language, English is increasingly gaining more popularity and greater status. That is why it is safe to argue that English would present an additional threat to local languages and cultures. This presentation will present the findings of a qualitative study that involves classroom observations of English language high school teachers and university professors. The aim was to examine how teachers deal with the possible superiority of Anglophone cultures with regards to local ones. Findings revealed that teachers’ practices reflected an implicitly preferential representation of Anglophone cultures as they taught culture and interculturality through comparison with Moroccan cultures.

Open Data in Computational Historical Linguistics: Upcycling of Chibchan wordlists

This work presents presents an ongoing research project on the phylogeny of the Chibchan language family which adheres to the current state-of-the-art of computational methods in Historical Linguistics. The aim is to show how we can upcycle alread...

The following steps of the workflow will be introduced:
i. Collecting already published data for the Chibchan family (Constenla Umaña 2005)
ii. Applying cross-linguistic data format standards (Forkel & List 2020)
iii. Detection of cognacy and working with Edictor (List 2017)
iv. phylogenetic analysis through Bayesian inference (Greenhill et al. 2020)

All data of this project was published by Constenla Umaña (2005) and will be upcycled
into the Cross-Linguistic Data Format (Forkel & List 2020) which adheres to certain standards which ensure comparability across languages. In the next step, this data is first analyzed automatically for cognates and then manually corrected where necessary (List 2017). In a final step, the cognates will be analyzed with computational methods, such as NeighborNetworks and Bayesian inference of phylogenetic trees (Greenhill et al. 2020).

The main goal of this presentation is to show how computational methods can enrich our
workflows also in more ‘traditional’ areas of linguistics and how we can upcycle old data to arrive at new conclusions about the languages of the world.

Gender syncretism

In this talk I want to address a very basic and fundamental question regarding gender: How do gender features look like? In order to approach this question I will present different patterns of gender syncretism. An investigation of these patterns ...

Both gender and syncretism have been discussed from many perspectives in the literature so far (for gender see for example Corbett 1991 and Kramer 2015b, for syncretism see Baerman et al. 2004 among many others). In my master's thesis I want to explore the combination of both topics. Work from Kramer (2015a, 2019, to appear) and the references above addressed already some interesting questions that arise within this combination of topics. However, there are still many questions that have to be answered or investigated in more detail.
First of all, the question right at the beginning is which patterns of syncretisms one can find in the languages of the world in the domain of gender. Some patterns have already been noted in the literature. However, aspects like the combination of syncretisms have been neglected so far. A detailed investigation of possible and potentially impossible syncretisms can lead to interesting insights regarding gender in general and gender features. How do gender features look like and which gender features does one actually need in order to describe the syncretism patterns? These are questions that I want to address in my thesis. In the talk I want to p...

Kosmetiksprache im Deutschen und Chinesischen

Der Vortrag geht es um eine vergleichende Analyse in deutschen und chinesischen Kosmetikanleitungen, um das Format der Kosmetikanleitungen, sowie die Gemeinsamkeiten und Verschiedenheiten zwischen beiden Sprachen herauszufinden.

Derzeit wird in Ländern wie Deutschland und China ein sehr hoher Lebensstandard genossen. Die Wirtschaft lebt vom Konsum. Hierbei wird insbesondere dem äußeren Verpackungsdesign und einer geeigneten Gebrauchsanweisung für die Produkte große Bedeutung beigemessen. Wie von Steves (1999) hingewiesen, können die Verpackungsaufschriften als Text angesehen werden und zusammen mit der Packungsbeilage die Kunden gut anleiten.

Eine vollständige Genreanalyse in der Linguistik wurde erst von Swales (1990) durchgeführt, die auf 48 Anleitungen in englischen Forschungsartikel basiert, und daraus eine „Move-Struktur“ geschaffen. Nachfolgend schlug Bhatia (1993) ein Modell für die Analyse von Verkaufsförderungsschreibens vor und verfeinerte es im Jahr 2013.

Auf der Basis „Move-Struktur“-Theorie stellt die Arbeit die These auf, dass Die Kosmetikanleitungen haben eine klare Themenstruktur, d.h. sie bestehen alle aus fünf Moves. Jedes Move ist mit unterschiedlichen Steps gestaltet.

Da die Steps unter jedem Move je nach Kommunikationszweck optional sind, werden unterschiedliche sprachliche Realisierungen, sozusagen Register, in deutschen und chinesischen Kosmetikanleitungen verwendet. Di...

Optimizing input complexity for the acquisition of indefinite and definite articles and personal pronouns: An artificial language learning study on gender-like category induction

During language acquisition, German grammatical gender poses difficulty due to a lack of reliable noun cues from which gender can be inferred and because of syncretism within the paradigm. These factors affect the acquisition of indefinite article...

The Development of Women's Language Use in Disney Films

The representation of women’s language use in the media plays an important role in both perpetuating and challenging stereotypical gender roles in society, and a particular area for concern is the impact that this can have when aimed at young audi...

In order to show that there has been development in the portrayal of women’s language in Disney films, it is important to use examples of Disney’s earliest films, e.g. Cinderella (1950), as well as examples from the more recent additions to the Disney franchise, such as Brave (2012). Both films feature women as the protagonist, and also include a range of women in the role of a supporting character, providing substantial material for analysis. The fact that both films form part of the Disney princess franchise is also significant, as these films can have a deep impact upon young audiences who learn what a princess behaves like and looks like, which is problematic when such films offer prescriptive and stereotypical depictions of women’s language and gender roles in general. Generally however, Disney’s the portrayal of Disney’s female characters has undergone a development from flat, two-dimensional personalities to rounded, fully realised, three-dimensional characters with increased agency and independence. Therefore, this talk will take as its starting point different research approaches in order to establish the theory that will inform my analysis, and then I will present my i...

Posthumanist Approaches to Language in Digitalized Societies

What do the users think about their interactions with their voice assistants? How do they perceive Siri or Alexa – a person, a computer or something in-between? Is Alexa female or male? Does our perception change when we can carry some voice-contr...

The presentation will be about an ongoing research project for my master’s thesis. The qualitative study that I am currently conducting aims to identify the language ideologies of voice assistant users. I will firstly introduce the two main fields that guide my thesis: language ideology research and posthumanist applied linguistics. These approaches should allow us to have a common ground for discussion and ask critical questions to our former definitions of language as well as their implications in current digital practices. The posthumanist perspective also aims to showcase that language is cognitively distributed, which pushes scholars to consider the external objects and environment during the analysis and interpretation process. Following the theoretical framework, I will present the current findings of my research that deals with the interactions of users with their gadgets, their perceptions and reflections. My focus group is currently set on Turkish speakers who reside in Germany. This sampling enables me to observe interesting uses of the speakers who are able to speak at least two languages fluently and mostly do not use these devices in their mother tongue.

Ending session - Abschlussplenum

In this session we're gonna wrap it all up. We have fun statistics about the conference prepared for you, talk about future StuTSes and TaCoSes and let you voice your thoughts about the last four days before we let all of you roam freely through gather town.