Gert Webelhuth was an invited speaker at this year’s Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP). He spoke On the role of c-command in German. In his talk, he presented empricial evidence against the c-command condition in German: (i) cases in which relative scope of quantifiers is not determined by their surface c-command relation, (ii) cases of pronouns that are bound by non-c-commanding quantifiers, and (iii) cases of NPIs that are not c-commanded by their licensers. Continue reading Webelhuth and Sailer presenting at CSSP 2019
Gerald Penn on “Writing, Decipherment and the Search for Meaning in Language”
Gerald Penn (Toronto)
will give a talk on
Writing, Decipherment and the Search for Meaning in Language
Wednesday, 7. August 2019
14.00 (st) – 15.30
Casino, 823 (Festsaal) Continue reading Gerald Penn on “Writing, Decipherment and the Search for Meaning in Language”
HPSG 2019: Conference report
This year’s HPSG conference took place in Bucharest, Rumania, July 24-26. It was very well organized and included a rich and interesting sightseeing program. Gert Webelhuth and Manfred Sailer were the
only participants from Frankfurt at HPSG 2019. Gert presented joint work with Olivier Bonami on syntactic haplology in Dutch and Manfred gave a joint talk with Monica-Mihaela Rizea on emphatic NPIs in result clauses in Romanian.
The papers presented at the main conference and at the pre-conference Continue reading HPSG 2019: Conference report
Bargmann on “Chopping up Idioms”
Monday, July 1, Sascha Bargmann submitted his doctoral dissertion. Congratulations!!
Sascha’s dissertation has the title Chopping up Idioms. Towards a Combinatorial Analysis. Sascha develops an argument for a consequent lexical treatment of idioms, whenever such a treatment is possible. To do this, he looks at data that have not been taken into account systematically in the previous literature.
Two IEAS-talks at HPSG 2019
This year’s HPSG conference will take place in Bucharest. It will host two talks that are based on long-standing cooperations of members of the IEAS-linguistics department with other partners:
- Monica-Mihaela Rizea (Bucharest) & Manfred Sailer: Representing scales. Degree result clauses and emphatic negative polarity items in Romanian
- Gert Webelhuth & Olivier Bonami (Paris): Syntactic haplology and the Dutch proform ‘er’
Crevels on South American indigenous languages
Mily Crevels (Leiden) will be a guest at the IEAS June 11 & 12. She will present part of her work on indigenous languages in South America in Manfred’s class Introduction to Linguistics 2. The talk will be particularly suited for students, as it does not presuppose prior knowledge on the topic.
South American indigenous languages: The importance of language documentation
Mily Crevels (LUCL, Leiden University)
e.i.crevels@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Continue reading Crevels on South American indigenous languages
International Year of Indigenous Languages: Events at the IEAS
2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL). World-wide, many initiatives use this occasion to raise awareness for indigenous langauges, their importance, the threats that they are facing, and their chances. Continue reading International Year of Indigenous Languages: Events at the IEAS
Sailer at Modification of Complex Predicates, Düsseldorf
Manfred Sailer gave an invited talk at the workshop on Modification of Complex Predicates, Düsseldorf, 23.&24.5.2019. The workshop was organized jointly by a number of projects of the SFB 991: The structure of representations in language, cognition, and science.
The workshop organizers, Curtis Anderson, Timm Lichte, and Jens Fleischhauer aimed at bringing together researchers on various kinds of complex predicates and at jointly discussing to which extend modification data can help shed light on the properties of complex predicates. The 10 workshop presentations illuminated exactly these aspects using different types of data and analytical tools. In his own talk, Manfred looked at modified kinegrams as in (1).
(1) Alex pricked her big ears. Continue reading Sailer at Modification of Complex Predicates, Düsseldorf
Niko Schenk Contributes to Beta Writer
In early April the international and German press and other media reported on the publication of the first software-generated scientific book, a volume which summarizes state of the art research on lithium-ion batteries and appeared with Springer Nature. One of the creators of Beta Writer, the software behind the book, is Niko Schenk, who works and teaches linguistics at IEAS and is simultaneously affiliated with the Applied Computational Linguistics Lab in the computer science department. We linguists at IEAS are all very excited about his work and its impact!
If you are interested in the technology and in the challenges posed by the automatic generation of research books, the introduction to the freely available electronic version of the book gives an overview on the ongoing research in this area.
Frankfurt Summer School: Linguistics
This year’s Frankfurt Summer School (5.8.-30.8.) offers a 4-weeks course package in research methods in linguistics.
The modules are open to all interested students. They are particularly useful for students of disciplines in which language plays an essential role, such as linguistics, philology, literary studies, media studies, gender studies, ethnology, (foreign) language teaching etc.
The lecturers are: Gerald Penn (Toronto), Janina Radó (Frankfurt a.M.), Frank Richter (Frankfurt a.M.), Iverina Ivanova (Frankfurt a.M.), and Ulrike Schneider (Mainz)
Module 1: Basic Research Methods in Linguistics (weeks 1 and 2, 05.08.–15.08.)
Language is an essential feature ofall humans that distinguishes us from all other known species. The study of human languages is not Continue reading Frankfurt Summer School: Linguistics