The proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 2021 are now available online. They contain a contribution by Manfred Sailer on “Use-conditional licensing of strong negative polarity items.” In the paper, Manfred further develops the theory of his 2021 HPSG paper that strong NPIs can be licensed by a negation at the non-at-issue semantics. The new paper looks at strong NPIs in German in verum focus constructions and in raising declaratives. Continue reading Sailer in Sinn und Bedeutung 2021 proceedings
Asadpour et al in HPSG22 proceedings
The proceedings of this year’s HPSG conference are now available! The volume includes a contribution by Hiwa Asadpour, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer on “Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraint on grammar and use.” The paper is based on Shene’s work on relative clauses in English and Kurdish, Hiwa’s fieldwork on varieties of Kurdish, and Manfred’s work on non-at-issue meaning. Continue reading Asadpour et al in HPSG22 proceedings
Hiwa on Minority Languages and Inter-ethnic Peace
Hiwa Asadpour 
will give an online talk on “Minority languages and inter-ethnic peace through a linguistic perspective” at Hiroshima University. The event is organized by the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability.
The talk will take place December 7, 2022, 10:30-11:30 am, Japan Standard Time, i.e. 2.30-3.30 am Berlin time)
Abstract:
Kurdish is an Indo-European language from Iranian family. Kurdish is spoken in various regions, such as the west and northeast of Iran, Continue reading Hiwa on Minority Languages and Inter-ethnic Peace
Webelhuth on c-command constraints in German
Gert Webelhuth’s paper on “C-command constraints in German: A corpus-based investigation” has been published ahead of print in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft.
In the paper, Gert addresses the role of c-command constraints in the grammar of three phenomena in German: relative quantifier scope, quantificational binding, and negative polarity. He presents the results of a large corpus study that demonstrate empirically that scope of one quantifier over another, quantificational binding, and Continue reading Webelhuth on c-command constraints in German
Asadpour publishes cross-linguistic corpus study
Hiwa Asadpour (IEAS and JSPS International Fellow at University of Tokyo) has just published a paper in the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory on “Parts of speech and the placement of Targets in the corpus of languages in northwestern Iran.”
This study applies a corpus-based quantitative approach to the word order typology and linguistic theories about word order in several genetically unrelated language varieties in northwestern Iran. Continue reading Asadpour publishes cross-linguistic corpus study
Asadpour et al. at HPSG 2022
Hiwa Asadpour, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer sketch an analysis of English and Sōrānī Kurdish non-wh relatives in their talk at HPSG 2022 (July 29-31, 2022) on “Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use.” In both languages, there is variation between bare relatives and relatives introduced by a function word, that and ka respectively. The authors discuss some aspects of social meaning that is attached to the choice between the bare and the non-bare variant. Continue reading Asadpour et al. at HPSG 2022
Tutor*in gesucht: Intro Linguistics (WiSe 22/23)
Note: The position has been filled
Für das Wintersemester 2022/23 ist in der Abteilung Linguistik des IEAS Tutoriumsstelle für die Introduction to Linguistics zu besetzten.
Aufgaben:
Unterstützung der Lehre in der Englischen Sprachwissenschaft Continue reading Tutor*in gesucht: Intro Linguistics (WiSe 22/23)
Research project supported by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung extended by one year
The research project ‘Conversion in English: The interaction of generic knowledge, contextual information, and syntactic constructions’ headed by Prof. Dr. Gert Webelhuth (research assistant: Dr. Heike Baeskow) will be supported for a further year, till April 2023.
The aim of this project is to develop a usage-based model for English conversion which efficiently describes this highly dynamic yet non-arbitrary process. The focus of the analyses is on (1) the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors which determine the non-overt shift from one (conceptual) category to another, (2) the way non-derived denominal verbs acquire their argument structures, (3) the interaction of context-free and context-dependent interpretations, and (4) the identification of communicative-pragmatic functions of conversion. The main database comprises 507 innovative converted verbs from the Oxford English Dictionary. Continue reading Research project supported by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung extended by one year
Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact
DALC (Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact) is an open, informal, non-institutionalized special interest group, started by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza-Pust, and Manfred Sailer, early 2022 at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt a.M.
DALC brings together researchers with various areas of specialization interested in the investigation of the dynamics of asymmetric language contact. Typically, Continue reading Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact
DGfS 2023 workshop on “Coexistence, competition, and change …”
Next year’s annual meeting of the German Linguistics Society, DGfS 2023 (Cologne, March 8-10), will host a workshop on Coexistence, competition, and change: Structural borrowing and the dynamics of asymmetric language contact, organized by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza-Pust, and Manfred Sailer. The workshop is part of the activities of the informal special interest group Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact (DALC) that Carolina, Hiwa, and Manfred have recently started. The workshop aims at bringing together various lines of research in the investigation of the dynamics of asymmetric language contact Continue reading DGfS 2023 workshop on “Coexistence, competition, and change …”