Schedule 74. StuTS

Opening Session

Conveying parody in multimodal discourse: a case study of several parodies of an apology video by Coleen Ballinger

This paper investigates different aspects of parody as a genre performed in a multimodal setting on the basis of selected videos created in response to an apology video by Coleen Ballinger entitled hi. (among them those made by Jackfilms, MeatCanyon, Abe Timm and oeod animation). Berger (2016: 123) defines parody as deployment of conscious intertextuality with a source (be it a text, a style of an author or a particular genre) in such a way so as to produce humorous effects. The aims of this paper are to determine which verbal and non-verbal elements are deployed to establish intertextuality and convey parody, which aspects of the source material are subjected to parody, as well as to compare all selected videos in order to discover relevant similarities and differences among them. As the author of the apology performs it whilst playing the ukulele throughout the entire video, music is a significant element in all parodies, but in different fashion. In one of the videos parody is achieved not by modifying the verbal or melodic aspects of the source material, but by offering animations of an imagined scenario of the author of the apology using the exact song in a courtroom. In ot...

Insights into the Interaction of Tone, Stress and Morphophonology in Wampis

A talk about the stress and tone system of Wampis (Jivaroan, Peru) within a Optimality Theory framework

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

This talk accounts for the tone and stress systems in Wampis, a Jivaroan (or Chicham)
language from the Peruvian Amazonia. Wampis presents several fascinating word-level
phenomena, such as vowel elision, vowel harmony, nasalization, and other different
morphophonological processes. The complex interplay between these word-level phenomena,
a strict phonotactic structure, and prosody results in extreme opacity (cf. Kiparsky 2000), as
seen in (1), and poses significant challenges for the analysis and description of languages like
Wampis.

(1) /hintinakaratinu/ - [hintíŋkartin] ‘teacher’
/paantamana/ - [paánman] ‘plantain (accusative)’

While this interaction between stress and tone has led to various categorizations of
other Jivaroan languages as having ‘pitch accent’, ‘tone-stress’, ‘accent’ or ‘stress’ systems
(Beasley & Pike 1957; Fast 1975; Payne 1990; Overall 2018), it is important to note that
Wampis has certain characteristics. Wampis has a single tone in a privative H/Ø system
(Hyman 2009) and exhibits three clearly distinct high-tone types – lexical, metrical and
grammatical – that...

Wem geht noch der Arsch auf Grundeis?

Chamorro fieldwork (online): The borrowed article un

As part of my practical semester I was able to conduct online fieldwork. I worked together with speakers of the indigenous language of the Mariana Islands called Chamorro (alternative spelling: CHamoru). Due to the colonization of the Spanish Empire starting from the 16th century until the end of the 19th century it was heavily influenced by Spanish and adopted a lot of Hispanisms. One of the borrowed words, and the focus of this project, is the article un. It integrated itself into the system of determiners that previously consisted of the common article i and the zero article. This integration interferes with the definiteness based split-ergative system. un is used to introduce new discourse participants which are high in topicality and are specific-referential. They are known to the speaker but not to the listener. When an object is high in topicality and definiteness an ergative-absolutive pattern is very likely to be used. As topicality and definiteness is a continuum, un is being used for a more distinct measurement. Before the Spanish influence, the common article i was used instead of the borrowed un. My goal for the fieldwork was to find out when exactly the un article ...

BuFaTa Vernetzungsstreffen

BuFaTa-Vernetzungstreffen
Beim BuFaTa-Vernetzungstreffen möchte das BuFaTa-Referat mit allen interessierten Personen über die BuFaTa ins Gespräch kommen. Das Treffen soll die Gelegenheit zu einem informellen Austausch geben, in dem besprochen werden kann, was die BuFaTa ist und was sie sein kann/soll. Insbesondere Interessierten ohne Erfahrung mit der BuFaTa soll hier die Gelegenheit gegeben werden, sich näher zu informieren und ins Gespräch zu kommen.

Sommergeschichten - Variation auf morphologischer und syntaktischer Ebene in der spontanen Textproduktion von Jugendlichen

The Ruins of the Tower of Babel

The paper with the title "The Ruins of the Tower of Babel" explores the fascinating interplay between language, unity, and diversity by firstly examining the historical journey of artificial languages, focusing on Esperanto and Volapük, in light o...

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

I will start my presentation with a main story, a story that probably all of us heard before, in which we once spoke the same language, but out of our greed we got seperated into different tribes and tongues. ( Genesis 11: 1-9)
In the further parts, I will connect the effort of mankind to get connected with one language with this story, showing this effort as a revenge for the tower of Babel.
In order to do so, first I will start with literary languages like Latin but also emphasizes the fact that they were only a bridge among scholars and clerks. Then I will continue with giving insights about constructed languages with the idea to learn one human-created language to understand everyone. When one talks about consructed languages, one must mention Esperanto, the most popular among constructed languages. I will tell what kind of vision L.L. Zamenhof had and how his vision has failed.
Our second and last stop on constructed languages is Volapük, not because it is an amazing constructed language but because the creator Johann Martin Schleyer, a german catholic priest started creating this language aft...

Differenzielle Objektmarkierung in den slawischen Dialekten des Ohrid-Struga-Areals

Examining the Relationship Between Socioeconomic Status and Performance on the German Frequency-based Vocabulary Test

This research project delves into the intricate dynamics of caregiver education, socioeconomic influences, and their impact on children's vocabulary acquisition. It explores the linguistic development of children raised in diverse family environments, differentiating between those with caregivers holding higher academic degrees and those with Secondary School diplomas. The study investigates whether vocabulary rankings align with children’s language usage by employing the Leipzig Vocabulary Tests in German and analyzing speech corpus data from CHILDES German Leo Corpus, Miller Corpus, and Koch Corpus. Surprisingly, it challenges conventional wisdom by revealing that socioeconomic status does not exert as deterministic an influence as expected, thereby challenging the established "Matthew effect" principle. This research offers crucial insights into the multifaceted relationship between caregiver education, socioeconomic factors, and children's vocabulary development, emphasizing the necessity for a more nuanced comprehension of the linguistic milieu in which children develop and learn.

Aspektualität in Deutsch und Deutscher Gebärdensprache (DGS)

Insult, Slander and Defamation: Metaverbs of Insult and their Semantic Origins

Verbs meaning ‘insult’ stem from a wide array of sources. Thus, by examining their etymology, they are a great opportunity of studying the ways and motivations of semantic change. For example, the English verbs insult (originally Latin ‘to leap at...

In etymological research, two factors are of importance: phonological correspondence and semantic plausibility. While the phonological correspondence is corroborated by established methodology, semantic plausibility is often overlooked. Research within the typological possibilities of semantic change is clearly needed, since it is the only way of confirming if two words are truly connected in two languages.
For this paper, “we rely on the theoretical assumption that semantic change, although not predictable, is not arbitrary, but motivated“ (Pozza 2020: 236). Thus, it is fruitful to describe the semantic change that has led to the meanings of lexemes belonging to the same semantic field in order to broaden our understanding of the mechanics and possibilities of semantic change.
Speech act verbs in different languages can seldomly be traced back and connected to a common word meaning said speech act. Because of that, they make a great starting point for research of semantic change. This paper focuses on metalexemes in ancient Indo-European languages meaning ‘to insult, slander, offend, defame, etc’. Featured languages include Old High German, Old Norse, Latin, Greek, Middle We...

Perpetuating world views: The (re)production of Discourses in educational space

Visualization of toponym distributions with R

Partitivpronomen und Partitivdeterminierer in der ostbelgischen Varietät des Deutschen

Partitivpronomen, wie etwa in (1) und (2), tauchen in zahlreichen Varietäten des Deutschen auf,
wie zum Beispiel im Hessischen (Strobel 2017), Walliser Deutsch (Strobel & Glaser 2021) aber
auch im Niederländischen (Sleeman & Ihsane 2020; Sleeman & Luraghi 2023). Darüber hinaus
verfügen das Luxemburgische (Döhmer 2020) sowie ostbelgische Varietäten zusätzlich über
Partitivdeterminierer, s. (3).
Das Paradigma der luxemburgischen Partitiva besteht aus däers/es für unzählbare
Maskulina und Neutra im Singular, där/der für unzählbare Feminina im Singular oder Plurale,
wobei die erst genannte Form die starke Variante darstellt, während die zweiten Formen das
schwache Pendant bilden. In ihrer Nutzung als Pronomen besteht Variation zwischen den
starken und schwachen Partitiva, während als Determinierer lediglich die starken genutzt
werden können (vgl. Döhmer 2020: 98–102).
Um die Existenz von Partitiva in den ostbelgischen Varietäten des Deutschen zu belegen
wurde eine Datenerhebung durchgeführt, welche die Annahme bestätigte. Demnach bilden der
und däs in komplementärer Verteilung das Partitivsystem in Ostbelgien. Dabei ist ihre Nutzung
abhängig vom Referenzno...

Pravi Purgeri

Das gehören-Passiv in der österreichischen Standard(schrift)sprache

Okkasionelle Nominalkomposita in den Überschriften österreichischer Tageszeitungen

Vermittlung von regionalen Varietäten im Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-Unterricht

Sprache und Trauma – Einblicke in ein junges Forschungsfeld

Metapragmatik: Linguistik an den Schnittstellen zwischen Sprachsystem, Sprachgebrauch und Gesellschaft

BufFaTa Arbeitskreis

Arbeitskreis Ausstattung
Nicht erst seit kurzem leiden viele unserer Studiengänge und Institute unter chronischer Unterfinanzierung und den daraus resultierenden schlechten Studienbedingungen. Oft werden deshalb Studienmittel, Mitarbeiterstellen, Professuren oder gar ganze Studiengänge und Institute gestrichen.
Deshalb haben wir den Arbeitskreis “Ausstattung und Situation sprachwissenschaftlicher Studiengänge” gegründet. Unser Ziel ist es, einen umfassenden Überblick über eure Studienbedingungen und die Situation eurer Studiengänge und Institute zu bekommen.
Im Rahmen dieses Arbeitskreises haben wir eine Umfrage zum Thema erstellt und an viele Fachschaften verschickt. Die Ergebnisse der Umfrage möchten wir auf unserer Sitzung in Wien besprechen. In einem nächsten Schritt können wir dann gemeinsam überlegen, was wir als bundesweite Vereinigung unternehmen können, um die Situation unserer Institute und Studiengänge zu verbessern.
Wenn ihr Interesse habt, euch an unserem Arbeitskreis zu beteiligen, kommt gern vorbei oder schreibt einfach eine Mail an ak-ausstattung@bufata.stuts.de

Typisch Österreichisch?

Ein Blick auf Trash-TV, Moral und das fernsehbegleitende Sprechen

Extracting Scenario Knowledge in LLMs: A Case Study with ChatGPT in English and Spanish

Since last year, the launch of ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2023) has revolutionised the state of the art in Large Language Models (LLMs). One can only imagine the possibilities that such a powerful tool can bring, since LLMs may illustrate how humans understand words through the notion of scenario, or "knowledge about the world that can involve groups of events and entities that often appear together" (Erk and Herbelot, 2022, p. 22). This is the basis of how humans build mental representations of words, since every word is linked to one or multiple scenarios. Understanding how LLMs extract scenario knowledge information may thus provide insight into how humans understand language. The purpose of this study was to find the best manner of extracting scenario information from words from LLMs in a human-readable form. To achieve this, we tested the generated texts of 15 words with ChatGPT in English and Spanish. Our objective was to try to generate a meaningful description that contained all the required elements per scenario and, if available, overlapping frames. Scenario descriptions were used as criteria for a successful generation, through a combination of WordNet (Princeton University, 20...

Zeit, Tempus und Temporalität

The limitations of assessing the degree of language vitality: the example of Belarusian

Assessing the degree of language vitality is essential to inform language policies, but it also has a lot of limitations. The Belarusian language is a good example of how the existence of dialects and mixed speech varieties, a lack of high quality...

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

The talk will address the ambiguity of the status of the Belarusian language, which results from the controversy around the actual number of speakers of Belarusian, Russian, and Belarusian-Russian Mixed Speech as well as discriminatory practices by the Belarusian government. It will be shown how scientific research and decision-making can be affected by the lack of reliable sources and the incompetent formulation of language-related questions in the census.

References:
Brown, N. A. (2007). Self-reported Russian and Belarusian language
utilization in key economic, political, and social domains in Belarus. Russian Language Journal/ Русский язык, 57, 59-87. American Councils for International Education ACTR/ ACCELS.
Douglas, N., Elsner, R., Krawatzek, F., Langbein, J. & Sasse, G. (2021). Belarus at a crossroads: attitudes on social and political change. ZOiS Report, 3 (March 2021).
Ethnologue (2023). SIL International. Retrieved from https://www.ethnologue.com/.
Hentschel, G., Brüggemann, M., Geiger, H. & Zeller, J. P. (2015). The
linguistic and political orientation of young Belarusian a...

What the Chat(-GPT)!?

Metrolingualism in Berlin

How Slurs Cause Offense

Slurs can be, as those who have been at the receiving end of them may attest, strong at causing serious offense, humour, and even damage to the social standing of the speaker themselves.
Slurs have an offense-causing effect in many situations – ...

Slurs can be, as those who have been at the receiving end of them may attest, strong at causing serious offense, humour, and even damage to the social standing of the speaker themselves.
Many of the views seeking to explain them may fall short at either explaining effects that occur in specific social environment such as the "innocent use" of slurs, which means either the use of a slur in what may be called a bigoted environment, leading to the slur not being perceived as offensive, or the use of a slur used by someone part of the group of people the slur describes, which may just as well lead to the same result. On the other end, most views also fail to account for the fact that the mere mention of a slur may also cause offense.
I will compare competing views such as the descriptivist, expressivist, presuppositional and prohibitionist one and outline a view that is able to deal with the problems mentioned above, utilising speech acts as well as a sense of common ground.

References:
Anderson, Luvell; Lepore, Ernie (2013): What Did You Call Me? Slurs as Prohibited Words. In Analytic Philosophy 54 (3), pp. 350–363. DOI: 10.1111/phib.12023.
Cappelen, Herman; Dever, Josh (20...

Chit-chatting about ideophones and morphosyntactic integration

The morphosyntactic capacities of ideophones vary strongly between languages. In this presentation, I talk about ideophones of FEAR in Korean, Japanese, English and German and the differing way in which they can be used as predicates.

The inventory of ideophones in Korean and Japanese is massive, at least in popular comparison to well-studied Indo-European languages (Heine 2023: 146). While the debate on ideophones' status regarding their function and lexical category is ever-ongoing, this work is concerned with the degree of grammatical integration ideophones have in a language and the correlation of that integration with their capacity for predication. Using a sample of ideophones specific to the conceptual domain of FEAR from Korean, Japanese, English and German, I aim to find some answers to the question of whether grammatical integration (i.e. prosodic integration, negatability, variable morphology, constituency) might be proportional to the degree to which an ideophone can predicate over the rest of a sentence. I hypothesize that there is a positive correlation: While in languages with poorer integration like German and English, adverbial and quote-like constructions (e.g. "the car went 'boom'!") predicate more indirectly using ideophones, there are a number of reasons that could cause ideophones in Korean and Japanese to be more prevalent in predication. Among these are productivity in forming new ideo...

Produktivität von Lehnaffixen

Mary stole the cookie - No, Peter!

Hey, what's that cuteness doing to my sound symbolism effect?!

How do different sensory information interact with each other when they are expressed in one single sound symbolic word? In our perception, do they mix, or seperate? Or do they join to make a stronger effect?

Sound symbolism has received increased attention in the recent decade, with more studies aiming to discover and establish connections between sounds and meanings beyond language. The "Bouba-Kiki" effect - referring to the perceived softness and spikiness of the words - as well as the sound-size symbolism coded by high and low vowels are two of these established associations, to name some. But while these effects always describe only one single feature of the referent in question, rarely anything in this world can be described by one single property, and so a necessary question for future sound symbolism research arises:

How do different sensory information interact with each other when they are expressed in one single sound symbolic word? In our perception, do they mix, or seperate? Or do they join to make a stronger effect?

Paper(preprint): https://psyarxiv.com/62ne9/
This research was conducted by: Dominic Schmitz(1st author), Defne Cicek, Anh Kim Nguyen, Daniel Rottleb

Hure, Bitch und Schlampe: Kompliment oder Beleidigung?

Acquisition of nominal phrase in written L2 French : errors and strategies

This paper focuses on the nominal phrase in the written texts of French language students at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. The goal of the paper is to identify the parts of the target language system that students still have difficulties mastering, even after three years of studying French at the University, and the strategies they use to overcome these difficulties. We analyze the errors third-year students of French made in the nominal phrases in the argumentative essays they wrote. Some of the identified errors are article choice errors, gender and number errors, errors in order of the elements, agreement errors etc. When making errors, students either partially follow the rule or overgeneralize the rules they learned. The errors result from substitution, omission or addition of the elements. In most cases, the errors are intralingual, resulting from the target language itself; but in some cases, we also found errors resulting from the negative transfer from the students’ native language – Serbian. It is interesting to note that even at the advanced stages of second language acquisition there are still errors in the use of categories for which we would presume they ha...

Die paarigen Körperteile im Slowenischen: eine vergleichende Studie

L-Vokalisierung in Mittelbairischen Dialekten

Bewegende Emotionen

Die Verwendung von phonetischer Transkription bei verbaler Entwicklungsdyspraxie

Consonant F0 effects. A case study on Catalan

In many languages of the world, it has been consistently observed that vowels differ in their fundamental frequency (F0) due to intrinsic characteristics, such as their height but also due to extrinsic factors such as preceding segments. In the case of the latter, voiceless obstruents generally increase the F0 values of the following vowel while voiced obstruents tend to decrease it (House and Fairbanks 1953, Lehiste and Peterson 1961). The phenomenon, widely considered to be a phonetic universal, has been proposed in the literature to be caused by automatic but also controlled factors through so-called ‘phonetic knowledge’ (Kingston and Diehl, 1994). True large-scale investigation of this phenomenon has, however, been limited. In this study, we investigated consonant F0 effects (henceforth CF0) in the Catalan vowel system using a large-scale speech corpus. We employed the Common Voice Catalan Dataset with around 240 hours of recordings and more than 32.000 individual vowel segments from 200 Catalan speakers (Ardila et al., 2020). The methodology employed for curating and extracting the measurements is described in the VoxCommunis Corpus (Ahn and Chodroff, 2022). We found that v...

"Sprache ist ein wunderbares Mittel, um Zugehörigkeit zu konstruieren. Und Zugehörigkeit ist immer auch Identität."

Misinterpretation under morphosyntactic attraction:

The presentation reports on some results of my master thesis which is concerned with the theoretical evaluation of attraction effects in reading times and interpretations of the critical clause's actor as well as its number feature. For this purpose, German subject-verb dependencies of embedded possessive relative clauses have been manipulated in a 2x2 fully-crossed factorial design (grammaticality x attractor verb match). Sentences were presented in a self-paced reading experiment and followed by open-ended comprehension questions, targeting both the interpretation of the number feature and the interpretation of the actor of the embedded relative clause (thematic subject).
Here, only results about the interpretation data will be accounted for and discussed in the context of the two major theories of agreement attraction: the encoding-based accounts and the memory retrieval-based accounts. The former explains attraction effects in terms of false encoding of the number feature on the subject noun; thus predicting number misinterpretations. The latter assumes a cue-based memory retrieval mechanism that is triggered at the verb. Due to interference, there arises the possibility o...

„Code-switching und Mehrsprachigkeit in öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln in Wien:

Ziel dieser Studie ist es Wahrnehmungen und sprachbedingtes Verhalten von Sprecher*innen in öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln in Wien zu untersuchen, welche auf Sprache und Mehrsprachigkeit zurückzuführen sind. Zudem sollen vor allem die Gefühle des Un-/Wohlseins sowie der Un-/Sicherheit in Bezug auf Sprache und Mehrsprachigkeit, in öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln, beleuchtet werden. Hier gibt es zwei Dimensionen, die in dieser Arbeit untersucht werden: Menschen in öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln als Sprecher*innen und als Zuhörer*innen. Unter Bezugnahme des Konzeptes des Spracherlebens und Forschungsergebnissen zu Sprache und Emotionen, sowie Theorien zu Sprachideologien und Sprachregimen, untersucht die Studie, wie und ob mehrsprachige Personen mit Deutsch als Nicht-L1-Sprache und Sprecher*innen mit Deutsch als L1 entscheiden, ob sie in öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln eine Sprache sprechen oder nicht, abhängig von verschiedenen Faktoren und Situationen. Weiterhin werden die Einstellung und die unmittelbare Reaktion der Teilnehmer*innen als Zuhörer*innen nicht-deutscher Sprachen im Öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln untersucht. Zu diesem Zweck wurden qualitative halbstrukturierte Interviews durchg...

La Neurmandie est-elle jeulie ?

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

This study examines /ɔ/-fronting, in which /ɔ/ is fronted towards /œ/, in
the French spoken in Caen and Le Havre (LH). This phenomenon originates from working-class Parisian French (Martinet 1958). Recent research suggests fronted variants are spreading throughout France (Mooney 2016), but especially in Northern French (Armstrong and Low 2008, Boula de Mareuil, Adda-Decker and Woehrling 2011). These studies are however limited in scope, as they often rely on small samples and have only surveyed a limited set of locations. To fill these gaps, this study tests in Caen the literature’s prediction that /ɔ/-fronting is present throughout Northern France. In LH, where fronting has been attested, a pilot study explores the effects of speaker’s socioeconomic class on the variable, a factor that has often been left aside in previous variationist studies of (ɔ). A corpus of fourteen sociolinguistic interviews, 10 from Caen and 4 from LH, was collected and transcribed. Measurements of /ɔ/’s f2 are retrieved at vowel midpoint. Lobanov-normalised values are analysed through mixed-effect linear regression. The resul...

Ortsnamen und Siedlungsgeschichte am Beispiel des bairischen Sprachraums in Österreich

Das Adjektiv – eine kategorielle Melange?

Reflexive predicates and the Voice-v division of labor

In this presentation, I propose a novel approach to deriving reflexives in transitive constructions that relies on the emergent cooperation between v and Voice in binding-as-agreement (BAA). I characterize anaphoricity with a reflexive-Voice that ...

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

Especially with the advent of minimalist approaches to syntactic derivation, a growing pursuit since Chomsky (2000; 2001) concerns laying out the mechanisms of the Agree operation, the primary tool for feature-based dependencies (see Deal, 2023). Debates over the years have included search-space directionality, locale (syntax versus PF), and halting conditions. The particular line of research explored here involves the reducibility of binding to Agree (binding-as-agreement — henceforth: BAA), one of multiple ways in which researchers have attempted to decompose Conditions A–C (see Chomsky, 1981).

Two particularly intuitive principles guide a BAA approach. The fundamental restriction of precedence in anaphor distribution is described by Haspelmath (2023) as "antecedent-reflexive asymmetry" (2023: 37) — a postulate which entails Condition A. Moreover, the cross-linguistic empirical pattern emerges that pronominal forms and antecedents tend to match in φ-features (see Collins & Postal, 2012; the Pronominal Agreement Condition as in Angelopoulos et al., 2023).

Based on antecedent-reflexive asymmetry a...

"Sie wünschen sich glatte Haut ohne Dellen."

Perceptual dialectology within Greater Manchester:

This talk will discuss a recent study I did for my final year undergraduate project. The project investigated the effect of geographical proximity on the successful identification of accents and how the presence of particular phonological features...

This study presents a small-scale investigation on recognition of urban language varieties within Greater Manchester. The study focuses on the two boroughs of Salford and Stockport exploring how geographical proximity and the presence of distinctive phonological features can impact recognition rates, specifically exploring how this data can be used in forensic applications when judging reliability of witness speaker identifications.

An online survey was used to explore how these variables impact recognition rates with listeners given 12 audio stimuli from three different boroughs, both Stockport and Salford and also stimuli from Trafford was used as a distractor. Each of the given stimuli included one of the four phonological features THOUGHT, HAPPY, GOOSE and START vowels and each vowel was present in one stimuli per borough.

The data in the present study revealed that geographical proximity had more of an impact on Salford respondents than on Stockport respondents and that the presence of certain phonological features particularly the START vowel can increase the likelihood of correct identification. The data also revealed the amount of interspeaker variation on correc...

From ‘people’ to plural: Grammaticalization in Andoke, an Amazonian isolate

Our talk presents original research on Andoke, an isolate from the Colombian Amazon, in which we discuss the development of the plural marker -siʌ́hʌ.

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

Andoke is a highly endangered language isolate spoken by some 30 speakers in the Southern Colombian Amazon. Forming part of the Caquetá-Putumayo cultural area (Echeverri 1997), Andoke maintains intense contact with other languages and cultures of the area, yielding relative cultural and possibly structural linguistic homogeneity (e.g. Wojtylak 2018). The language had received relatively little attention until the 1970s, with anthropologist Jon Landaburu first providing a comprehensive grammatical description of Andoke (Landaburu 1979) and more research being conducted by Landaburu ever since (e.g. Landaburu 1992, 2000, 2023). Until now, research on Andoke has suggested that the language is hardly using any nominal plural marking. Landaburu (1979: 323, in passim) provides examples of a bound classifier -siʌ́hʌ evoking the notion of “plurality and collectivity”, only being used on animate nouns. This morpheme is glossed as “group” by Landaburu and does not seem to be an obligatory, dedicated plural marker; it rather appears to be primarily used in ethnonymic compounds (“people”) or in appositional noun co...

“You-grass-eat while I-food-make”?

Baker's "Polysynthesis Parameter" offers a generativist definition for the phenomenon of polysynthesis.
In my bachelor's thesis, I aimed to find out whether the Yeniseic language Ket fits into this concept. (Spoiler: It doesn't, but Ket still roc...

In the linguistic landscape of Siberia, the Yeniseian languages and Ket, their only surviving
representative, are "exotic". Despite numerous attempts to prove relationships to other
languages or language families, they have so far been considered isolates. Ket has several
typological peculiarities that make it an interesting object of research for comparative
linguistics: One of the most nameworthy features is the polysynthetic character of the Ket verbal
complex.
Researchers have deemed different criteria obligatory for a language to be polysynthetic. One
of the more uncontroversial criteria is nominal incorporation. Ket, among a variety of other
languages across the globe, can incorporate nouns into verbal stems, producing constructions
such as the following:

da -tukun -bat -o -il -kit
3SG.F.SBJ -comb -1SG.OBJ -TH -PST -stroke
"She combed me."

Nominal incorporation is also an important part of Baker's "polysynthesis parameter" theory:
According to Baker, polysynthesis is characterised by the activity of a macroparameter
consisting of two parts, one of which is nominal incorporation. This theory, in turn, is based on
the assumption that nominal in...

Mehrsprachigkeit in Fanfiction

The paradigm as a dynamic category

Syntactic deletion and preservation in the world of Englishes

There has been a lot of research on different aspects of varieties of English (also known as World Englishes) in terms of phonology, morphology, discourse analysis, and typology. Fewer work has been done on the effect of the contact between English and other important languages in countries where English is considered a second language (L2 language) and its imprint on the syntactic structure of these varieties of English. In my BA thesis, I have begun to examine the correlation between the influence of first languages being contact languages (L1 languages) and the structural complexities of certain varieties of English leaving behind the actual point of interest in deletion and addition of syntactic features in correlation with language contact. For the purpose of this presentation, I would like to return to this core idea: the connection between Mesthrie and Bhatt’s (2008) ‘deleter-preserver’ continuum, which puts varieties of Asian Englishes on the end of deleters and varieties of African Englishes on the end of preservers. I will focus on the influence of Swahili as L1 language on Kenyan English (KenE) and Cantonese as L1 language on Hongkong English (HKE). As for my thesis, ...

Language Use in Tunisian Higher Education : Code-switching or Languaging?

There is unquestionably a wealth of literature regarding code-switching (CS). It is known as a linguistic process where speakers alternate between two languages; it is also considered as one aspect of language contact. Although these studies have been highly pertinent to the development of a CS framework, little credence is given to CS and its functions in the Tunisian context. The study addresses this research question: To what extent and in what circumstances are Arabic, French and English used in Tunisian higher education contexts? To find answers to the research question, this study uses two types of observations namely informal observation and formal observation to collect data from a variety of ways. The informal observation took place in informal settings, namely university corridors and eateries and the formal observation was conducted in classrooms. The aim of the informal observation is to investigate the languages used by students in public places. The classroom observation was used again to investigate the languages used in classes. The aims of this study are to present the developed observation charts, the process of collecting data and the results. The researcher d...

QAnon in den sozialen Medien

Censorship

In my talk, I would like to introduce the basics of censoring language in the media, the effects this can have on a society, and how this can be applied to literature (in particular, Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’)

Influencing, even manipulating, societies through the calculated use of language is an ever-present topic in politics and the social sciences. In the second world war, propaganda played a huge role in establishing the dictatorship’s ideology and driving the war. In present times, it is very noticeable in the Ukrainian war, especially when looking at how consistently the Russian government enforces censorship throughout their media outlets. But censorship doesn’t have to be connected to wars only. It is everywhere. Hollywood has dictated what could be discussed in films for a long time (see e.g. Bernstein 2000). Some American presidents, like Bush or Trump, are known to have used the press to their advantage to win elections (see e.g. Borjesson 2004).

The topic of my talk will orientate itself around my master’s thesis, which I will begin in October. In my master’s thesis, I will look at how the language used in three speculative fiction novels influences and controls the fictional society. Since this talk is for STUTS, I will focus more on the linguistic part of my thesis, which is the theory my literature analysis is based on and introduce the basic concepts of censorship ...

Are neural networks all you need?

In the past few years we have seen rapid growth of neural-network based architectures solving a variety of tasks with impressive benchmarks. However, very little has been said about the "pipeline code" enabling these improvements. This talk examin...

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

While neural networks have solid applications, when we talk about neural architectures the code that is used to enable training objectives is seldomly discussed. In this talk we will examine a number of pre-training and post-training steps of popular neural network architectures, and how they can be used to improve traditional (e.g BOW) models.

Two languages = two selves?

Colloquial Upper Sorbian and the Sentence Bracket

BuFaTa

Transparenz sprachlicher Mittel im Rechtsrock

Poster Session

Please see the 'room' to the very right in the schedule for individual poster information and ignore their time slots.

Entwicklung eines virtuellen Klienten

Word separation in the Old Turkic runiform script

„Hast du denselben Gedanken wie ich?“

Paarformeln/Wortgeschwister mit Vornamen als sprachliches Phänomen im Kontext von Hate Speech auf Twitter/X

Inaugural Workshop of the “Emerging Scholars Initiative” (ESI) of the Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics (AALL)

Workshop zum wissenschaftlichen Umgang mit Excel

Interlinear Glossing Workshop

Die ThemaTalkers - Wie organisiert man eine studentische Tagung

Scavenger Hunt - Let’s learn RegEx the fun way!

I want to fake brie! - Roonerspism Shorkwop

A general introduction into spoonerisms, including their history, their real life uses (deliberate and accidental), and the forms that spoonerisms can take on in different languages (English, German, and Vietnamese), as shaped by the respective la...

“Would you like fake breast for breakfast?” - “I would rather take a coffee, cake and toffee. And later I'll write a sad ballad about this bad salad. But let me shake a tower first.”

No, this workshop won't teach you how to make vegan cheese or meat. Sorry. It's about spoonerisms. Spoonerisms are a special form of metathesis in which sounds, syllables, or morphemes are switched in neighbouring words and syllables. Whether emerging as “slip of the tongue” in everyday speech, or deliberately created as a rhetorical device in poetry and prose, spoonerisms have been observed in different languages dating back at least as early as the 17th century. As the ability to create spoonerisms relies on phonological processing skills, yet does not require a speaker to be literate, spoonerisms have also been used in neuroscience studies to investigate language development and reading disabilities in children. However, neuro linguistic approaches are not going to be the main focus of this workshop.

Instead, we will give you a general introduction into spoonerisms, including their history, their real life uses (deliberate and accidental), and the many forms that spoonerisms can take on in ...

Emerging Linguists

Closing Plenary