Manfred Sailer and Nicolas Lamoure (Frankfurt a.M.) presented a paper on “Superlative ‘ever’ in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish” at the 30th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 2023.  Manfred and Nicolas look at the use of English ever in emphatic superlatives as in (1) in two Germanic and two Romance languages:

(1) a. nl: de beste opmerking ever ‘the best comment ever’
       b. de: bestes Bild ever ‘best picture ever’
       c. fr: la meilleure idée ever  ‘the best idea ever’
       d. es: la mejor foto ever ‘the best picture ever’ Continue reading Sailer & Lamoure at HPSG 2023 →

The 45th Annual Conference of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS 2023) hosted a workshop on “Coexistence, competition and change: Structural borrowing and the dynamics of asymmetric language contact.” The workshop was organized by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza Pust, and Manfred Sailer and is part of the activities of the initiative DALC (the Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact).

The workshop covered a number of very different language contact situtations, including the contact between sign-languages and spoken languages.

The workshop was not only organized by members of the IEAS, but also included two presentations and two posters by the organizers: Continue reading Workshop on “Coexistence, competion and change” →

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 →

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 …” →

Manfred Sailer & Suzanne Smith will present a poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 2022, Prague, 14.-16.9.2022, with the title “In ages is not an NPI, which explains its distribution.”

This research is based on Suzanne’s BA thesis, in which she extracted detailed corpus profiles for the negative polarity items (NPIs) in a milion/thousand/… years and contrasted them with the Continue reading Sailer & Smith with a poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 2022 →

Hiwa Asadpour, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer will present a joint paper on “Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use” at this year’s HPSG conference.

Continue reading Hiwa, Shene & Manfred on non-wh relatives at HPSG 2022 →

Hiwa Asadpour will give papers at two international conferences in August. Congratulations!!

He will present a paper on “Flagging-drop typology and its relevance on Target Word Ordering” at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics 2022, ICHL 25 — University of Oxford, 1-5 Continue reading Hiwa at conferences in Oxford and Bucharest →