Last term Dr. Assif Am-David took part at the Writing Fellow Programme of the university writing centre (Schreibzentrum), a pilot that was first introduced at the Goethe University. This involved 7 courses university wide across all disciplines. As a part of this Continue reading Am-David in the “writing fellow” programme
Campus Westend in Pictures
Campus Westend is a great place to be. We have been busy taking pictures to show you why.

There is a lot more where this representative example came from.
Emmon Bach (1929-2014)

It is with great sadness that we learned that Emmon Bach died on November 28.
The website http://emmonbach.info is a place for sharing memories and contains many pictures from the Emmon Fest in Frankfurt just a few months ago.
Emmon’s colleagues from SOAS have have posted a Tribute to Emmon Bach.
An obituary has been posted on the Language Log.
TAU-GU Workshop on Relative Clauses
November 27th to 30th, the Research Group Relative Clauses hosted a workshop on relative clauses, sponsored by the Strategic Parnership Program (DAAD) and the Research Group 1783 (DFG). The aim of the workshop was to intensify the scientific cooperation between Tel Aviv University and Goethe University Frankfurt.
There were three presentations from members of the IEAS linguistics section:
- Sascha Bargmann (Frankfurt): About bear services and flabbergasted building blocks – Applying Soehn’s idiom theory to English data.
- Gert Webelhuth (Frankfurt), Sascha Bargmann (Frankfurt) & Christopher Götze (Göttingen): Idioms as evidence for the proper analysis of relative clauses.
- Christopher Götze (Göttingen): On Jacobson’s and Barker’s analysis of binding-theoretic reconstruction effects.
Comments on Pronouns
The Pronouns@Tübingen 2 workshop in Tübingen from November 7th through November 9th provides a venue for discussion on ongoing research on pronouns in general and, in particular, on pronouns in embedded contexts. Frank Richter contributed a commentary on Sarah Zobel’s talk in the special session On the non-uniformity of pronouns.
Second European Workshop on HPSG
The Second European Workshop on HPSG (EW-HPSG) will take place in Paris, November 17 & 18.
Information on the workshop and the program are available on the workshop website.
There will be three presentations by members of the IEAS:
- Assif Am-David & Manfred Sailer: An LRS encoding of a semantic typology of definiteness
- Frank Richter: Polyadic “same” and “different”
- Manfred Sailer: Inverse linking as complex quantifier formation
Centennial Fireworks
Goethe University celebrated its centennial anniversary with fireworks over Poelzig-Bau last Saturday. Here are four minutes (out of 15), posted on youtube:
New Page on the Blog
We are delighted to announce the addition of a dedicated Oberseminar page to our website: You might already have spotted the new menu item Oberseminar WiSe 2014/15 in the header area of this blog. The new page will keep you updated on the topics of our weekly Oberseminar on Monday, 16:15–17:45, in IG 3.201.
Visit to Toronto
This week Frank is visiting Gerald Penn at the University of Toronto in Canada on a grant from the International Office. We are investigating possibilities to establish a collaboration on research questions that are of interest to the computational linguistics group in Toronto and to the linguists at the IEAS.

Multilingual web site about the languages of Europe
lingvo.info is a website in 18+ languages that contains information on (at least) the official languages of the European Union.
The purpose of the web site is to promote multilingualism and an awareness for linguistic diversity. The information on the web site is carefully researched and presented in an easily accessible way. It also includes a huge number of links to other language-related sites.