Events
Friday 10:00
Friday 10:35
Keynote: Der nachgestellte definite Artikel in den Balkansprachen
Die Balkansprachen weisen viele gemeinsame grammatische Merkmale auf, die durch Konvergenz auf der Grundlage eines intensiven Sprachkontakts im Balkanraum entstanden sind. Eines dieser Merkmale ist der nachgestellte definite Artikel. Bisher herrsc...
Friday 14:15
Er, sie, dey?
Friday 14:50
“Is this gun cake or fake?”
In this talk, we present a corpus-based study of nine counterfactual German adjectives that allegedly behave privatively. Since Partee’s (2010) influential suggestion that priva- tive adjectives actually behave subsectively on the shifted denotati...
Indeklinable pränominale Adjektive – ein Versuch der Typologisierung
Wie sich sowohl im mündlichen als zunehmend auch im schriftlichen Sprachgebrauch beobachten lässt, können Wörter wie super, lila oder probeweise in die Rolle eines attributiven Adjektivs eintreten. Dies kollidiert freilich mit...
Friday 15:50
Language Policy Issues in Tunisia: Mismatch between Local Needs and Central Decisions
Language policies in Tunisia seem to be top-down policies where policy makers or central agents make decisions. Then, they transfer the decisions to universities and schools to apply them. This indicates that language policy is carried out by central agents and they, therefore, accommodate the macro policy goals. This study points to the mismatch between central and local agents and argues for agency and its role in the creation and implementation of language policies. In this regard, Johnson and Johnson (2015) argue that post-modern approaches highlight the role of agency in implementing language policies. The aim of this study is to foster social justice in creating language policies in the Tunisian higher education context by the implementation of post-modernism as a theoretical framework. Post-modernism encourages multilingualism in taking decisions. This study calls for rethinking about the needs of students and instructional language policy in higher education and voicing their views. Post-modernism shows that language policy needs to be developed in consultation with and have the commitment of those working most closely with the students (‘Bottom up’) (Baldauf, 1997, p. 4...
"Ey jo, und, wie fandest du gestern Schule?"
Gegenstand dieses Vortrags ist die Sprache von Jugendlichen in der Stadt Graz, wobei besonderer Fokus auf mehrsprachigen Jugendlichen liegt. Ziel ist es,, Ähnlichkeiten mit der Varietät Kiezdeutsch in Deutschland herauszuarbeiten und den Einfluss ...
„[Er] hat so ein ehrenlosen Move gemacht“, „weil die wohnt gleich Hauptbahnhof“, „ich bin
hyped, Digga“ und Co. – diesen und ähnlichen Phrasen begegnet man an Grazer Bahn- und
Schulhöfen oder in der Straßenbahn des Öfteren. Meist hört man sie von Jugendlichen in multikulturellen Gruppen. Im Vorbeigehen mag das nach „falschem“ oder „gebrochenem“ Deutsch
klingen. In Deutschland weiß man, diese Ausdrücke sind typisch für Kiezdeutsch, auch „Kanak
Sprak“ genannt, eine Varietät, die sich in urbanen Regionen Berlins mit hohem Migrationsanteil herausgebildet hat. Kiezdeutsch wird im Allgemeinen als ethnolektaler Sprachstil von jugendlichen Sprecher:innen unterschiedlicher ethnischer und sprachlicher Hintergründe verstanden (vgl. Wiese 2007: 3). Während es in Deutschland und anderen europäischen Ländern
wie Schweden, den Niederlanden und Dänemark bereits umfangreiche Studien rund um die
Sprache migrantischer Jugendlicher in urbanen Settings gibt (siehe dazu z. B. Wiese 2007,
Henschke 2008, Kotsinas 1992, Fraurud 2003, Appel 1999, Nortier 2001, Quist 2000), fehlt
eine solche Erhebung in Österreich bislang gänzlich. Anlass für unsere Pilotstudie ist daher
der mangelnde österreichi...
Friday 16:25
Verbatim memory during reading in L1 and L2
This talk presents the structure, methods, and some preliminary findings from the DFG project “retention of surface linguistic information during reading in L1 and L2”. In this project, we investigate the influence of linguistic factors on verbati...
'Nothing is something': How to read memes, readymades, and meaning
This is a work-in-progress chapter of my MA thesis on the lifespans of internet memes.
French visual artist Marcel Duchamp left a legacy of challenging the immediacy of form and meaning. In his words, “nothing is something” (Stauffer 2018). As perplexing as Duchamp and the dada artistic movement were to early 20th century audiences, this paper considers by comparison the emergence of similar memes (‘meme’ as loosely defined by Shifman 2014: 14). Duchamp’s term ‘readymade’ describes the lifting and (re)placement of an object into a new field of meaning, i.e. elevating the urinal as a toilet to a urinal as an artwork. Readymade demands of its audience to just simply ‘make do’, and to try to find new signification. Just like readymade artworks, the memes studied here typically pair hardly related yet highly specific texts and images together; a juxtaposition that seems superficially nonsensical, but is in fact relevant (cf. ‘relevance theory’ Sperber and Wilson 1996).
This is a work-in-progress chapter of a larger project on memes and is restricted to limitations in the searchability of images on social media. It is therefore based on handpicked tokens, and intends to initially bring to light new linguistic phenomena. I consider a transdisciplinary approach to issue...
Friday 17:00
Keynote: Entzifferung und linguistische Erschließung des Kaukasisch-Albanischen / Decipherment and Linguistic Disclosure of Caucasian Albanian
Among the many manuscripts that were found in a hidden cellar room in St Catherine's monastery on Mt Sinai in 1975, there were two that contained, as palimpsests, in their lower layers texts written in an unknown language and script. In the course...
Saturday 10:00
Keynote: Multimodal marking of prominence in communication
Following a multimodal conception of language [1], in this talk I will discuss the contribution of speech prosody and co-speech gestures to express prominence in communication. While speaking, interlocutors usually transfer information to their conversation partners to update the speaker-hearer common ground. The organisation of information transfer is subsumed under the notion of ‘information structure’ [2]. ‘Focus’ – being a cognitive category of information structure that represents the most important information of a sentence – usually carries high prominence [3]. In Germanic languages, a ‘focus’ is expressed prosodically by means of a pitch accent that is acoustically enhanced compared to the prosodic marking of less prominent information [e.g., 4].
From a visual perspective, co-speech gestures have been shown to coordinate with prosodic events [e.g., 5, 6]. Co-speech gestures are classified into different types according to differences in function [7]. For the present study, I will focus on iconic (referential) and beat (non-referential) gestures. An iconic gesture represents or supports a part of speech visually, e.g., a rounded window by forming a circle with both hand...
Saturday 11:05
Ditransitive GIVE-construction in three Hainan Min-Chinese: Interaction between inherited structures and contact-induced changes
This presentation discusses the historical development of ditransitive GIVE constructions in Hainan-Min Chinese. I identified the origin and the historical strata of coexisting GIVE verbs in present-day Hainan-Min Chinese and provided an explanati...
Ditransitive GIVE-constructions in Sinitic languages can be classified into two types: (1) the “canonical” [V-IO-DO] construction (i.e., “give me a book”), which is found in Mandarin, Northern Chinese and Southern Min-Chinese; and (2) [V-DO-IO] construction (i.e., “give a book me”), which is common in Southern Chinese (Hashimoto 1976). Hainan Min-Chinese is a variety of Southern Min-Chinese consisting of various dialects. It has undergone intense language contact with the indigenous Kra-Dai languages (Hlai and Be) and other Chinese varieties on the Hainan Island for more than one millennium (Liu 2006). Cao (2008) claims that Hainan Min differs from other Southern Min varieties in employing the [GIVE-DO-IO] construction, as well as using the verb /ʔio/ ‘take’as a GIVE verb. Zhang (2011) further argues that this is the result from the omission of dative markers in prepositional dative constructions (i.e., “take a book (to) me”) under the pressure of contact with [V-DO-IO]-type Cantonese.
This paper presents evidence from three Hainan Min dialects (Haikou, Qionghai, Gangmen) showing that [GIVE-IO-DO] (Southern Min) construction is strongly preferred, and that the [GIVE-DO-IO] (no...
Is my name more special than yours?
In research on anaphora resolution researchers usually assume the gender of their stimuli. Men are male, fathers are male, surgeons are male, and Phillips are male -- Are all Alex male? There is no research on ambiguous names and referential failu...
Social Motivations and Developments of English/German Code-Switching Patterns:
Presenting my MA thesis on English/German code-switching in the speech of L1 German speakers.
A working man's merge
This talk presents a mediating perspective on computational phrase composition between naïve additive composition and complex latent representations from regression models. The aim of the work presented is to reduce the unrestricted transformation...
This talk presents a mediating perspective on computational phrase composition between naïve additive composition and complex latent representations from regression models. The aim of the work presented is to reduce the unrestricted transformation of latent embeddings to a classification problem of convolutional filters at phrase level. The classifier is embedded within a Tree-LSTM (Tai et al. 2015) architecture and trained on truth-grounded sister node prediction. Preliminary results show evidence that a restricted selection of filters is enough for phrase construction in high-dimensional spaces, but also, there is more to it than addition.
This talk will introduce the distributional compositional semantics framework (Baroni 2014) and outline previous computational work into the texture of (semantic) merge, as well as present preliminary results from my Master thesis.
Baroni, M., Bernardi, R. and Zamparelli, R., 2014. Frege in space: A program for compositional distributional semantics. Linguistic Issues in language technology, 9, pp.241-346.
Tai, K.S., Socher, R. and Manning, C.D., 2015. Improved semantic representations from tree-structured long short-term memory networ...
Saturday 11:40
Is a typologically, genetically different language like European languages?
Yue is a Sinitic language spoken in Southern China which consists of numerous dialects including Cantonese. While we know that Yue is typologically and genetically different from European languages, do we find any similarities between these groups...
Dialectology is a discipline with a long history which is interested in the linguistic variation across space. For over half of the 20th century, dialectologists have been engaged with issues such as finding out whether dialect areas exist and seeking dialect classification. To address these issues, dialectologists had been conducting dialect surveys and plotting dialect features on maps. Findings such as dialects form a continuum, dialectal variation correlates to geography have been found in Europe, America and Japan, what about other parts in the world?
Yue, one of the ten branches in the Sinitic family, is spoken in southern China. Like western dialectology, there were several dialect surveys conducted in the Yue-speaking area and between the 1980s and 2010s, more than 100 dialects were surveyed. These data, however, were mainly used for language-specified studies with a historical orientation, implying they are relatively untapped for the purpose of dialect geography. Does Yue, a non-western language which was developed in a completely different sociolinguistic landscape, and social history, and from a completely different language family, show similar patterns as Europe...
Pitch please!
In der Arbeit wurde die Stimmtonänderung einer Drag Queen In- vs. Out-of-Drag betrachtet. Für die Analyse wurde auf die Python Bibliothek Parselmouth verwendet, mithilfe derer eine Analyse der Grundfrequenz und der Lautstärke erfolgte. Im ersten U...
Genitive Variation in English
This is a work-in-progress presentation of my MA thesis on genitive variation in English.
My MA thesis explores genitive variation in spoken Late Modern English in the 18th century. Genitive variation is the variable of main interest in recent research on syntactic alternations in English (Rosenbach 2014: 215). While there exists ternary alternation, my thesis excludes noun-noun structures and only focuses on the binary and interchangeable choice between the inflective
Saturday 12:15
"Perfekt perfekt?" - Zur diachronen Verwendung und Funktion doppelter Perfektbildungen in frühneuzeitlichen deutsch-französischen Fremdsprachenlehrwerken
Der Vortrag gib Einblick in das laufende Hausarbeitsprojekt und liefert erste Ergebnisse der manuellen Korpusrecherche. Im Sinne einer nachhaltigen Forschung soll darüber hinaus das diverse Forschungspotenzial der frühneuzeitlichen Fremdsprachenle...
T-glottallization in the speech of British youth on the example of the TV series Sex Education
The text discusses the phenomenon of T-glottaling in British English and how it is increasingly becoming a common feature among British youth. The article highlights that while previous studies have excluded glottal stop replacement in intervocali...
The text discusses the linguistic phenomenon of t-glottaling in British English and the growing trend of its usage among British youth. It mentions various studies on the subject and notes that glottal replacement before a vowel is increasingly common. The study analyzes two episodes of the TV series "Sex Education" and identifies instances of t-glottaling in various phonetic contexts. The study concludes that t-glottalization is being used as a common feature of the speech of British youth and is becoming an integral part of their linguistic repertoire. The text suggests that further research in this area could help understand the nature and origins of this phenomenon and its wider implications for the English language.
Perception of Formal Register of Azerbaijani and Attitudes Towards Avoiding Morphonological Processes
The Azerbaijani language has gone through changes in pronunciation over many years, which has become more apparent recently. Unlike Turkish, known for its pronunciation equivalent to written form, Azerbaijani has various morphonological...
Azerbaijani language has gone through changes in pronunciation over many years, which has become more apparent recently. Unlike Turkish, known for its pronunciation equivalent to written form, Azerbaijani has various morphonological processes affecting its pronunciation. (Law on Orthoepy Norms of Azerbaijani, 2021) However, there is a tendency nowadays to avoid these processes in formal settings, which could be explained in people’s view of the written language as ‘excellent’ using it as a basis for their speech, as observed in many other nations. (Kristiansen 2001) Our empirical study explores how Azerbaijani people perceive the formal register and how their understanding of it affects their pronunciation. Research questions aim to confirm and explain the differences in pronunciation between informal and formal situations, analyse demographic and sociolinguistic factors and investigate the attitudes of Azerbaijani people. The research employed a mixed-methods approach and was carried out in two stages using Google Forms for data collection. In Stage 1, 30 participants recorded themselves talking about a memory naturally. Afterwards, they were instructed to read 15...
The different kinds of verbal number suppletion
In my talk I want to introduce the phenomenon of verbal number suppletion and talk about its different types.
Furthermore I want to present the different data that have been argued to belong to this group. In the end, I want to present data and a...
Suppletion describes the pattern of morphemes that display phonologically completely separate stems, depending on some feature(s)/ (morphological) contexts.
Verbal Number Suppletion then, is the phennomenon where some number feature on the verb triggers its suppletion. However, there are a few different types of verbal number suppleltion and I want to talk about them in my talk. First there is participant number - i.e. suppletion triggered by the number feature of one of its arguments/participants. That means, depending on whether the object of a sentence is singular or plural we get a different realisation of a verb.
Another type of verbal number is what is called "pluractionality", i.e. the number of actions of a verb.
I will also discuss data from San Pedro Amuzgo (an Oto-Manguean language), where a pattern that on first sight looks like participant number arises, however, I will argue that this is not truly the case and it constitutes either a different type of participant number or a completely separate phenomenon.
Saturday 13:35
Feldforschung auf Ossetisch - eine Einführung in FLEx
Im interaktiven Workshop „Feldforschung auf Ossetisch – Eine Einführung in FLEx am Beispiel des Ossetischen“ tauchen wir gemeinsam in die Welt der Sprachforschung ein und lernen dabei das Programm FLEx kennen.
FLEx ist ein vielseitiges Werkzeug, ...
Text analysis without Strg + F
POV: Du möchtest einen Text statistisch auswerten, der nicht in existierenden Korpusanalyse-Tools verfügbar ist, und überlegst, Textstellen manuell zu zählen… Excuse me, wir haben 2023!
Der Workshop zeigt einen Weg, ein eigenes Python-Script an...
Requirements:
- A Google account with access to Google Drive (which equals access to Google Colab)
- An already installed python environment like PyCharm (https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/installation-guide.html#standalone)
- Text data you want to analyse
Einführung in die Amazonistik
Dieser Workshop gibt eine Einführung amazonistische Linguistik.
Die Bedeutung der Sprachenvielfalt des Amazonasbeckens, das annähernd ein Drittel Südamerikas ausmacht, wurde in ihrer Gänze erst recht spät erkannt.
Seit der Erkenntnis, dass Amazonien ein Paradies nicht nur für Biolog*innen oder Anthropolog*innen, sondern auch für Linguist*innen ist, hat sich gezeigt, dass Amazonien viele außergewöhnliche Sprachen beheimatet, die die oft eurozentrische Sicht auf Sprache radikal infrage stellen. Viele sprachliche Universalien mussten relativiert werden, viele bis dato unbekannte Merkmale wurden entdeckt.
Gleichzeitig sind diese Sprachen immer noch unterrepräsentiert, sowohl in vergleichenden Studien als auch in der universitären Lehre, wo es nur selten Einführungen oder gar Sprachkurse zu indigenen Sprachen Amazoniens gibt.
Dieser Workshop soll einen Überblick über Amazonien und die linguistische Amazonistik geben.
Zu Anfang geht es um die hohe Dichte nicht verwandter Sprachen und die geographische Verstreutheit der wenigen großen Sprachfamilien im “Flickenteppich” Amazonien.
Einblicke in die Hintergründe liefern uns die Geschichte und speziell die Forschungsgeschichte: In Amazonien wurde aus Missionierungsbemühungen und Bibelübersetzunge...
Introduction to Khinalug
In this talk I will give a short introduction to the East-Caucasian language Khinalug.
The talk gives an introduction to sociolinguistics, phonology and the main aspects of the grammar. A special focus will be the case system in comparison to o...
Khinalug is an East-Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) language, spoken in the Quba district in northern Azerbaijan by approximately 2500 people in the Village Khinalug.
The language is not directly endangered, but is under a strong Azerbaijani influence.
In this workshop we will look at the main aspects of Khinalug grammar with a focus on nominal morphology and especially the case system.
East-Caucasian languages are well known for their rich morphology and especially their large case systems, with a huge number of local cases. Khinalug differs from the typical case system of the language family and shows only a reduced set of local cases, namely essive, adessive, inessive, superessive elative and adelative. Also, the status of the inessive and superessive as productive cases is an ongoing research question.
We will also take a look at other phenomena of the nominal morphology like ergativity and noun classes and of course also discuss the most important aspects of verbal morphology, e.g. noun class agreement, light verbs and preverbs.
Saturday 15:00
Bemirschreibe, was gedirfällt
Wenn die litauische Sprache für etwas bekannt ist, dann für ihre (vermeintliche) Archaizität. Im Gegensatz zu anderen indogermanischen Sprachen hat das Litauische in Lexik und Morphologie viele Eigenschaften über die Jahrhunderte fast unverändert ...
The Lithuanian language is well-known for its supposed archaic Indo-European traits, mostly in its lexicon and (nominal) morphology. However, not all archaic-looking features of Lithuanian are indeed inherited. In this presentation I will present selected aspects of my Bachelor thesis on the ‘endoclitic’ personal pronouns of Old Lithuanian (16.-18. centuries CE). In Old Lithuanian, clitic pronouns may be inserted between preverb and verb, as in pa-MI-rodyk ‘tell ME’. The historical explanation of this phenomenon is somewhat problematic, as a direct connection to the so-called Indo-European tmesis (as it was brought forth by Petit 2010) is plausible, but ultimately unprovable. By investigating the Old Lithuanian usage and by comparing various similar phenomena in other Indo-European languages one may see instead how inherited syntactical features may be re-structured across various daughter languages in creative and interesting ways.
The presentation will be held in German, the language of my thesis; however, language examples will be provided with glosses and questions may also be asked in English or Russian.
Wenn Stances meine Sprache wären
In diesem Vortrag soll versucht werden, eine Erweiterung der Stancetaking-Theorie zu schaffen, mit dem expliziten Fokus auf den Positionierungsprozessen unter digitalen Bedienungen und damit verbundener Identitätsarbeit. Dies bedeutet unweige...
Wenn Kontinuierlichkeit und Kontextsensitivität als Leitmotive der Kommunikation betrachtet wurden, rückt der eigentliche Vorgang des Meinungsaustauschs und der Positionierung während der Online-Interaktion zunehmend ins Interesse. In diesem Zusammenhang trägt auch der Online-Modus dazu bei, wie Aussagen und bestimmte verbale Mittel interpretiert werden. Deswegen führt die Annahme, dass die Wahrnehmung des Gesagten anders in der digitalen Dimension funktioniert, zu den Fragen, in wie weit die erwähnte Art der Kommunikation modifiziert wurde und wie solche Veränderungen sich linguistisch wiederspiegeln. Darüber hinaus beeinflussen auch soziale Kontexte, wie das Gesagte oder das Implikatierte bewertet und interpretiert wird. Während sich der Ambivalenz-Aspekt von menschlichen Aussagen womöglich nie verdeutlichen lässt, bleibt digitale Positionierung eng mit den pragmatischen Konsequenzen von intersubjektiver Kommunikation verbunden. Um diese Stellungnahme klären zu können, werden die multimodalen metasprachlichen Mittel (z. B. Hashtags) mithilfe des Stance-Konzepts (Du Bois 2007) angedeutet. In diesem Zusammenhan...
Are temporal properties of speech influenced by auditory feedback?
That auditory feedback plays a significant role in online speech monitoring and thus in speech production, has been shown using real-time auditory feedback perturbation experiments. When auditory feedback perturbation is applied, how participants ...
The present study investigates the effect of temporal auditory feedback perturbation on Quebec French CVC syllables using the targets [sut] and [tus]. In the first condition (onset condition), the onset consonant [s] is stretched, while the vowel [u] is shortened. In the second condition (coda condition) the vowel [u] is stretched, while the coda consonant [s] is shortened. Because no final results can be presented yet, the talk will mainly focus on the study design and the method as well as speculate on how the temporal characteristics of Quebec French will possibly influence the results.
References:
Frankford, S. A., Cai, S., Nieto-Castañón, A., & Guenther, F. H. (2023). Auditory feedback control in adults who stutter during metronome-paced speech I. Timing Perturbation. Journal of fluency disorders, 75, 105943.
Karlin, R., Naber, C., & Parrell, B. (2021). Auditory feedback is used for adaptation and compensation in speech timing. Journal of speech, language, and hearing Research 64.9: 3361–3381.
Karlin, R., & Parrell, B. (2022). Speakers monitor auditory feedback for temporal alignment and linguistically relevant duration. The Journal of the Acoustical ...
Register and Style Variation in Instant Messaging: An Audience Design Approach
Computer-mediated communication (CMC), and particularly synchronous electronic registers such as instant messaging (IM), feature distinctive conversational strategies (hereafter IM strategies) that result from the emulation of face-to-face spoken ...
Saturday 15:50
Ein "Paradigmen"wechsel in der Konstruktionsgrammatik
Lightning Talks
Do you have interesting data that does not warrant a full talk? Do you have any wild conspiracy theories you want to share? Want to rant about breakfast? This is the space for you! In this session we will listen to and present 5 minute presentatio...
Understanding figurative constructions in political cartoons: A case study of the 2019 Hong Kong Protest
Political cartoon, as a form of critical discourse, is an illustration published on the editorial or comment pages containing a political or social message regarding current events or issues (El Refaie 2009; Schilperoord and Maes 2009). Similar to...
References:
Bounegru, Liliana, and Charles Forceville. 2011. ‘Metaphors in Editorial Cartoons Representing the Global Financial Crisis’. Visual Communication 10 (2): 209–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357211398446.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2009. ‘Metaphor in Political Cartoons: Exploring Audience Responses’. In Multimodal Metaphor, edited by Charles J. Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi. Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 11. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110215366.3.173.
Forceville, Charles. 2020. ‘Case Studies–Political and Non-Political Cartoons’. In Visual and Multimodal Communication, by Charles Forceville, 167–84. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190845230.003.0009.
Schilperoord, Joost, and Alfons Maes. 2009. ‘Visual Metaphoric Conceptualization in Editorial Cartoons’. In Multimodal Metaphor, edited by Charles J. Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, 213–42. Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 11. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110215366.3.213.
Ostoberdeutsche Reflexe im Hexenverhörprotokoll Fürsteneck 1703
Im Vortrag werden die Ergebnisse der linguistischen Analyse des Hexenverhörprotokolls Fürsteneck 1703 im Rahmen einer Bachelorarbeit vorgestellt. Die Untersuchung fokussiert ostoberdeutsche, also bairische Sprachmerkmale im Text. Dabei werden eine...
Hexenverhörprotokolle sind die schriftliche Dokumentation von originär mündlichen Kommunikationssituationen. Somit stellen sie ein „Fenster zur Mündlichkeit“ (Macha 2003: 182) dar, welches die Möglichkeit bietet, zumindest sekundär historische Mündlichkeit analysieren zu können, da medial mündliche Quellen historischer Sprache nicht existieren. Doch auch Verhörprotokolle dürfen keinesfalls als direktes Abbild des realiter Gesagten aufgefasst werden, vielmehr sind die Texte als juristisch zweckgebundenes, von Gerichtsschreibern ge- und überformtes Produkt zu verstehen, das in vielen Fällen bewusst manipuliert worden ist.
Um zwischen Merkmalen der Überformtheit der Textsorte, regionaler Schreibtradition und genuinen Reflexen gesprochener Sprache unterscheiden zu können, werden sowohl ostoberdeutsche Schriftsprachmerkmale, das Modell der Nähe- und Distanzsprache nach Koch/Oesterreicher (1985) sowie Textsortenspezifika vorgestellt. Dabei kommt der Textstruktur besondere Beachtung zu, da die verschiedenen Textebenen in signifikant unterschiedlichem Maße gesprochensprachliche Merkmale aufweisen. Die Betrachtung ausgewählter Beispiele aus dem Hexenverhörprotokoll demonstriert, wo di...
Saturday 16:25
Exploring Automation in The Analysis of Creative Shifts Found in News Translations: Machine vs Human Translation
The project presents the results of a research including the translation of a collection of news from English to Chinese in two modalities: MT and HT. An empirical approach is presented to quantify the creativity in each translation with the analy...
Exemplarische Kommunikationsprobleme bei Menschen mit pragmatisch- kommunikativen Entwicklungsstörungen am Beispiel der fiktiven Figur des Dr. Sheldon Cooper
Als Teildisziplin der Linguistik beschäftigt sich die Pragmatik nicht nur mit verbalen, sondern auch mit nonverbalen Aspekten der Kommunikation; Mimik und Gestik sowie weitere körpersprachliche Aspekte und die zwischenmenschliche Beziehung der Int...
Linguistic Necromancy
In one of the former StuTS I overheard the conversation of two participants talking about the pronunciation of a word in a dead language. One of them claimed that there is no point in discussing this since we cannot know the pronunciation anyways....
This informative talk aims at explaining what methods are being employed to infer the historical pronunciation of a language, in this case Classical Latin (81 BCE – 14 CE). Nearly every country in Europe has their own system of pronouncing and teaching Latin in schools. Though they may agree sometimes, they more often vary considerably and are heavily influenced by the phonetic system of the native language being spoken in that country. The pronunciation of Latin may even vary depending of the context (e.g. in church, being sung, …).
People in Ancient Rome will certainly have pronounced Latin differently than all the aforementioned systems. Because the phonetic value of many phonemes are relatively uninteresting, this talk will focus on some of the more “surprising” features. These features will not only be presented but it will be explained why that assumption has been made. The examples include: the pronunciation of 〈gn〉 as [ŋn] because of inscriptional evidence, puns and diachronic change; the nasalisation of vowels according to spelling variants, meta commentary and loans; and allophonic variation of /l/ due to meta commentary, synchronic alternation and diachronic change...
Saturday 17:00
Keynote: How can we know about the language of our ancestors? An exposé of the global history of language
Humans have communicated by language for thousands of years, maybe more. It is even likely that our earliest human-like ancestors, the Homo habilis more than 1,5 million years ago, used some language-like communication when they migrated from Afri...
Sunday 10:00
Keynote: Tone Languages: Introduction and typological overview
In the first part of my presentation, I will give a general definition of tonal languages and mention the most important parameters to consider when describing such a language from a typological point of view. The second part will be devoted to to...
Sunday 11:05
Keynote: Iconicity in language - on gestures and ideophones
Formal linguistics generally assumes that form-meaning relations in spoken language are arbitrary and not iconic. Ideophones, such as the English splish-splash, have been considered exceptions to this rule of arbitrariness. Recently, however, rese...
Sunday 12:10
The Role of Metaphor and Speaker Reliability in Reasoning
While the persuasive nature of metaphors is well known, previous research has focused on the effect of the metaphor frame on reasoning. So far, the question of whether the speaker’s reliability influences the recipient’s reasoning has not been inv...
Die Funktionen von Anführungszeichen in der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DGS)
Thema meiner Studie sind die Anführungszeichen-Gebärden im Referenzkorpus der Deutschen Gebärdensprache, die ich mithilfe des Analyseprogramms DGS-ANNIS in 11 distinktive Funktionsbereiche einteilen konnte.
In meiner Arbeit gehe ich zudem auf den aktuellen Forschungsstand zu laut- und gebärdensprachlichen Anführungszeichen ein, erkläre mein methodisches Vorgehen und stelle die einzelnen Verwendungskategorien anhand von realen Beispielen vor. Zudem sind Korrelationen mit dem Alter der Signer*innen sowie Erkenntnisse zur syntaktischen Position der Anführungszeichen in der gebärdeten Aussage feststellbar.
Obstacles for intergenerational language transmission. The case of Talysh in Azerbaijan
Talysh is a language of an ethnic group that forms a significant minority in Azerbaijan. The number of speakers has been estimated from 100.000 up to 1 million according to different sources (ACCORD 2017). Transmission of linguistic know...
Talysh is a language of an ethnic group that forms a significant minority in Azerbaijan. The number of speakers has been estimated from 100.000 up to 1 million according to different sources (ACCORD 2017). Transmission of linguistic knowledge and skills between generations is crucial for maintaining and developing a language and culture. Detailed studies of individual families can reveal difficulties and challenges of this process (cf. Chessa, 2010). This paper reports on a multilingual family of Talysh origin in Azerbaijan, where Talysh is used by the elder and middle generation alongside Azerbaijani and/or Russian. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with family members representing four generations (1st - born between 1946 to 1964; 2nd – 1965-1980; 3rd -1981-1996; 4th – 1997-2012). In this family, transmission of Talysh was mainly interrupted after the 1990s. The participants were divided into two groups: those who know or knew the Talysh language to some extent, and those who do not. Questions discussed in the interviews include the importance of Talysh identity and the Talysh language in a person's life, preferences of language use in various situations, ...
From huswif to slut - A diachronic look into the pejoration of women terms
Language plays a large part in how society treats women and thus, it needs to be looked at closer. Women’s rights activism has been on the rise due to misogynistic movements getting more attention by using pejorative language to convey their messa...
This talk combining historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will mainly look at some of the semantic developments of different terms.
The semantic derogation of women published by Muriel Schulz tells us that most terms denoting women have at some point in time undergone pejoration, but the publication of this paper was almost 50 years ago now, which raises the question - How have these terms changed since then and is Schulz's hypothesis still correct?
Sunday 13:15
Sunday 13:35
LaTeX Workshop
Tired of relabelling all of your 150 examples manually every time you open your thesis document? Want to do it the right way and create your very own beautiful tables, write glosses without all the nerve-wracking formatting? Then hop on and join o...
In this beginners’ workshop, we want to cover the basics of setting up your document to write a term paper or thesis in LATEX. Obviously, this includes a proper title page and tables of contents, figures and all your beautiful tables. We will look at sectioning, type setting, creating different types of lists and including symbols in your text. We will also introduce you to the perks of citing and creating automatic lists of references with LATEX. Beyond the type setting, however, we want to leave our focus open and therefore involve you, the participants, more and adapt our programme accordingly. In concrete terms, this means that you will set the focus on more specific topics and tell us what exactly you need for your LATEX project in a survey.
Potentially relevant topics might include but are not limited to tables – the intricacies of combining rows and columns, labelling your tables for further reference in text –, following specific scientific writing standards (APA, MLA...), glosses based on the Leipzig Glossing Rules, syntactic trees, semantic formulae etc. Based on the survey results, we will have a look at what LATEX has to offer for your specific needs. At the end o...
Trees, Waves and Friends
Languages can be related, everyone knows this. Usually linguists use a tree to display relationships between languages. But trees are not the only model for language diversification. This workshop is aimed at non-historical linguists who would lik...
Genealogical trees belong to the best-known models in linguistics. Linguist of all fields and backgrounds (and most non-linguists too) know that languages can be related and that these relations can be represented in a tree. However, trees are not the only model of language diversification that linguists have come up with during the past 150 years.
The aim of this workshop is to give an introduction to different models of language diversification and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. During the workshop you will develop a "passive knowledge" of these models in order to evaluate the models you incounter in the literature.
Models discussed will include:
* phylogenetic trees
* things that look like traditional trees but aren't
* wave theory
* glottometry
* lexicostatistics
References
Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical linguistics: an introduction. 3. ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.
Evans, Cara L., Simon J. Greenhill, Joseph Watts, Johann-Mattis List, Carlos A. Botero, Russell D. Gray & Kathryn R. Kirby. 2021. The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376(1828). 20200056
h...
Interne und gemischte Rekonstruktion: Wie man etwas über die Vergangenheit isolierter Sprachen erfährt
Das klassische Vorgehen bei der Rekonstruktion von Protosprachen besteht darin, Daten aus verwandten Sprachen zu vergleichen. Was aber, wenn es keine verwandten Sprachen gibt? Ist die Sprache dann tatsächlich „ohne Geschichte“, wie der Indogermani...
A “lost” language of Northern Germany
This workshop will give a crash course in Wangerooge Frisian, a now extinct minority language of Northern Germany. We will discuss the linguistic sources, phonology, and grammar of the language, and read a short text excerpt together. No prior kno...
Germany is home to many languages, but some of these are virtually unknown by the linguistic community. One such language is Wangerooge Frisian, a small Germanic language once spoken on the Wadden Sea island Wangerooge. The language probably went extinct in the 1930s, but was extensively documented by linguists in the 19th century. This linguistic documentation is of exceptionally high quality, but has so far received little attention, and the language as such remains underinvestigated.
In this workshop, you will get a quick crash course in Wangerooge Frisian. After an introduction to the linguistic sources, we will look at some interesting phonological and grammatical features of the language, such as the curious rule of /r/-insertion and the contrast between “strong” and “weak” definite articles. At the end, we will read a short text together in order to get a better feel for the language.
The workshop is open to linguists of all stripes and backgrounds. The language of instruction will be English. No prior knowledge of any other Frisian language is required.
Sunday 15:00
Migrationsbedingte Mehrsprachigkeit im rätoromanischen Sprachgebiet
Im Schweizer Kanton Graubünden ist die rätoromanische Sprache in einigen Gemeinden nach wie vor sehr vital: Dort wachsen die Bewohner nicht nur mit der deutschen Sprache auf, sondern werden auch von ihrer Kindheit an mit dem Rätoromanischen sozial...
Language variation and digital place-making. How online (language) rooms are constructed, perceived and utilized by German-speaking Twitter users
With an ever-growing public and scientific interest in digital communication, the question arises as to whether and how traditional linguistic sub-disciplines can play a role in analysing patterns of online language use. The proposed presentation ...
A set-theoretic typology of casemorphs
I'll give a summary of case syncretism and case containment in languages across the world. Then I'll classify them into groups based on the number of arguments in a clause and foreshadow possible implications for grammatical theories of case.
In this talk I'll first give an overview of studies investigating form similarities in case morphs (Baerman, Blake, Caha, Zompi and my own observations), namely syncretisms (f.e. Burushaski: gus ('woman') - ABS, guse - ERG, gusmo - GEN; dán ('stone') - ABS, dáne - both ERG and GEN) and containments (f.e. Agul: zaw ('sky') - ABS, zawu - ERG, zawun - GEN).
Then I'll classify the different patterns using a set theoretic system developed by Carroll (2021) for multiple exponence. I analyze the resulting classifications as reflecting the number of arguments in a clause (henceforth called arity classes). Based on this I'll formulate the hypothesis that case morphs can share their form with another case morph iff they both express an argument of the same or adjacent arity class.
References:
Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown, and Greville G. Corbett (2005). The syntax–morphology
interface: A study of syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blake, Barry J. (2001). Case. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [1st edn., 1994.]
Caha, Pavel. 2009. The nanosyntax of case. University of Tromsø dissertation
Carroll, M.J. Verbose exponence: Integrating the typo...
Sunday 15:30
Sunday 16:10
Sie sind eben unterschiedlich
German has a range of modal particles, uninflected words that do not have a rich meaning in themselves but instead act as metalingual expressions that indicate to the hearer the mood or attitude of the speaker towards a proposition (Bross 2012). T...
Morphological Contexts of Final Schwa Apocope in German
Schwa constitutes a word-final morpheme to mark the case and number of nouns in German. Its status as a morpheme has been debated and reduced to a solely prosodic unit due to the possibility to omit it, e.g. dem Tag(e) (Wiese 2009). Yet apocope of...
Fleischer, J., Kuhmichel, K. & Speyer, A. (2012). „Sprachveränderung bei Goethe: Das auslautende Schwa in den Werther-Fassungen von
1774 und 1787“, in Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 40 (3),
305–351.
Lameli, A. (2021). Remarks on the consistency of schwa apocope in the geography of German dialects. In: Nevaci, M. et al. (ed.). Ex Oriente lux. In honorem Nicolae Saramandu. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 683–702.
Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory, In: Hardcastle, W. J. & Marchal, A. (ed.). Speech production and speech modeling.Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 403-439.
Rabanus, S. (2008). Morphologisches Minimum: Distinktionen und Synkretismen im Minimalsatz hochdeutscher Dialekte. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 134. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Wiese, R. (2009). The grammar and typology of plural noun inflection in varieties of German. In: The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 12, 137–173.
Lowkey, I Think He's Cringe
Increasingly, English slang words, such as "cringe," are being adopted by German teens, mainly due to language contact through the internet and social media. In English, the formation of slang involves changing and adapting the original meaning of...
Finitheit in Abchasisch
Der Begriff "Finitheit" wird häufig verwendet, um zwischen bestimmten Arten von Verben zu unterscheiden – zum Beispiel zwischen "finiten" Verben und "non-finiten" Verbformen wie Konverben, Partizipien oder Masdaren - und zwar in vielen Sprachen. ...
Referenzen
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2007. "Deconstructing categories: finiteness in a functional-typological perspective." In
Irina Nikolaeva (ed.), Finiteness: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations. 91-114. Oxford University Press.
O'Herin, Brian. 2020. "Abaza and Abkhaz." In Maria Polinsky (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Languages of
the Caucasus. 447-488. Oxford University Press.
Rouveret, Alain. 2023. Nonfinite Inquiries: Materials for a Comparative Study of Nonfinite Predicative
Domains. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.