The AUVIS project is a collaboration between different institutions from IT and the humanities aiming at developing audio/video software to manage large quantities of data in the social sciences. Technological progress in AUVIS is paired with scientific research on the interaction of grammar, prosody and gesture in event segmentation.

Find more information on the AUVIS project at the Language Archive website.

Contact: Meytal Sandler M.A.

The Beaver or Dane-zaa language is an endangered Canadian First Nation language spoken in British Columbia and Alberta. It is part of the Northern branch of the Athabaskan language family and is spoken in seven different reserves: the Northern Alberta dialect in Boyer River and Child Lake; the Central Beaver dialect in Doig River, Blueberry River, and Prophet River; and the Western Beaver (“low-marking”) dialect in Halfway River and Moberley Lake in British Columbia. A fourth, “Southern” dialect was spoken around Dunvegan (Alberta), with reserves in Clear Hills and Horse Lake. Beaver is closely related to its neighboring Athabaskan languages, especially Sekani.

Contact: Dr. Dagmar Jung

A “Bilateral Workshop Germany-Mexico and First Latin-American Summer School on Language Documentation and Linguistic Typology”, held in cooperation between the University of Cologne, Department of Linguistics, and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (Mexico), will take place in Morelia (Mexico) from March 19 to March 28 2015. The event consists of two parts: in a “Panel of Experts” researchers will present their research on several aspects of language documentation, while in the following Summer School, classes on the documentation techniques and related issues, such as language documentation in contact situations, will be given.

The Workshop and Summer School are funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Contact: Dr. Katja Hannß

It is widely acknowledged that demonstrative reference to a physically present object (known as exophoric reference) is not a straight-forward matter of locating the object in spatial terms. Established functional descriptions, which adhere to the spatial notion for want of video data, have proofed insufficient and partly incorrect by findings in a corpus of audio-video recorded texts from Logea (an endangered language in the DoBeS program). In order to validate these findings, we investigate exophoric demonstrative references across three archived DoBeS corpora: ?ven (Northern Tungusic), Saliba-Logea (Oceanic), and Totoli (Austronesian, Sulawesi). The data comprise oral narratives, procedural texts and expositions that are spontaneously produced and video-recorded. This permits us to combine the morpho-syntactic and discourse-pragmatic analysis of each demonstrative construction with the systematic evaluation of both the accompanying gestures and the spatial relation in the triad speaker-addressee-physical object. We aim to develop a taxonomy of the functions that demonstratives with exophoric reference have in the interaction between speech participants.

Contact: Carmen Dawuda

The major aim of the Summits project, a cooperative project between the CELD in Manokwari and the Linguistics Department at the University of Cologne, is to improve on and extend the documentation of a group of culturally and linguistically interlinked languages in the Central Highlands of Indonesian Papua.We strive to achieve this in three ways:
The first component of the project consists of processing already collected data of the two Mek languages Eipo and Yale. Eipo and its neighbouring language Yale have been studied thoroughly by Volker Heeschen for several decades. The original audio recordings that were made during his field stays in the 1970s and 80s will be digitalized within the Summits project and will be made available via the Language Archive of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Furthermore, the existing data will be complemented by new recordings in order to cover a broader range of communicative events.
The second component of the Summits project consists of the documentation of Pass Valley Yali, a Dani language spoken by approximately 5000 people (Ethnologue 2009) in the highland area east of Angguruk. The data collected within this project will be from the district of Apahapsili, mainly recorded in the villages of Apahapsili, and Masahangguli, and their surrounding hamlets. While a Bible translation has been published and some linguistic work by German missionaries who have been working in this area since the 1960s exists (e.g. Zöllner “Verbformen der Angguruk-Sprache”, unpublished manuscript), the major aim of the Summits project will be to compile a corpus of naturally spoken language, focussing especially on informal everyday conversations and other spontaneous communicative events. Just like in the Eipo-/Yale-component of this project, we thus aim to build upon existing works, systematically complementing older data with new material in order to gain a comprehensive documentation of the Yali language.
Thirdly, in cooperation with colleagues at UNIPA, an extensive capacity building program in descriptive and documentary linguistics is being organized for local students and staff members at the University of Manokwari, West Papua. Having attended this program, students will be encouraged to carry out their own documentation projects, in which they will document their native languages. During these closely supervised projects they will be funded by scholarships that will cover their expenses during their field stays as well as tuition fees and living costs during their last semester when they write their B.A. thesis. The collected data will be processed according to DoBeS standards and archived in the Language Archive in Nijmegen. By offering local students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge in linguistics and field work methods, and by providing them with the technical equipment of modern language documentation, a contribution is made to building a sustainable basis for the documentation of endangered languages in Indonesian Papua, the main mission of the CELD.

Contact: Dr. Sonja Riesberg

Totoli is an endangered language of northern Central Sulawesi still spoken by at most 5000 speakers. The recordings made in this project focus on spontaneous communicative events covering a broad range of interactional domains. These include everyday conversation, ritual speech, procedural texts on major activities, oral history, as well as interactions with speakers from neighboring speech communities.

Contact: Dr. Sonja Riesberg

The Wooi project includes a strong capacity- and institution building component for sustainable language documentation work in the region. It is based on the hypothesis that endangered languages in an area of more than 240 speech communities need the establishment of documentation structures both at a regional and a local level.

Contact: Freya Morigerowsky M.A.

Einige Sprachen Äthiopiens zeichnen sich durch einen erstaunlich reichen Verbwortschatz aus. Monomorphematische Spezialverben erlauben äußerst detaillierte Beschreibungen von Situationen. Ziel des Projekts ist es, die Architektur der den Verben zugrunde liegenden Lexikalisierungsmuster und ihre Interaktion mit der Syntax in der semantischen Domäne Essen, Trinken und Nahrungszubereitung zu erfassen. Ausgehend von einer Analyse im Kambaata (Kuschitisch) werden die semantischen Gemeinsamkeiten und Besonderheiten von Verben in vier äthiopischen Vergleichssprachen untersucht. Das Projekt möchte einerseits die Anwendbarkeit verschiedener semantischer Theorien und Modelle auf Sprachen der "geographischen Peripherie" testen, andererseits der Kuschitistik und der Diskussion über den äthiopischen Sprachbund neue Anregungen aus der lexikalischen Semantik geben.

Data from the acquisition of German as a second language have been and are being collected from two native speakers of Russian who were 8 and 14 years old upon their arrival in Germany in January 1998, when they only had very limited knowledge of German. The project aims at following as closely as possible from the very beginning and over a prolonged period of time the natural development of German as a second language in these two sisters from Saint Petersburg. We expect to provide detailed data of 60 min. per week of their spontaneous speech, collected in conversational interaction with native speakers of German from different age groups. The data are digitalized and a sound track (MED, D. Broeder, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) is added to the orthographic transcripts in CHAT format (The CHILDES Project, MacWhinney 1995). This allows researchers to listen to the sound data starting from any line of the transcript. The data may be used for studying the morphosyntactic, lexical, pragmatic, and phonological development of German as a second language. Furthermore, they might provide evidence for the theoretical question of a "critical period" for language acquisition.

The INNET project reinforces a worldwide sustainable grid of digital archives hosting resources related to endangered languages. One of the goals is the strengthening of the relationship between archives and the scientific community worldwide by disseminating knowledge and information on language technology as well as best practice in language documentation.

Contact: Dr. Dagmar Jung

Kallawaya is a mixed and secret language spoken in the Charazani region of north-western Bolivia. As a mixed language, Kallawaya takes its lexicon and grammar from different and genetically unrelated languages. The lexicon of Kallawaya is mainly provided by Pukina, now extinct, while the grammar derives from a Southern Quechua variety. Kallawaya is also a secret language, used only by traditional herbalists during healing ceremonies; as such, it is not designed for use in everyday communication and has a reduced lexicon. The language is acquired only as L2, while the native language of the Kallawaya herbalists is Quechua. Today, Kallawaya is highly endangered; the number of its speakers is yet unknown. The project seeks to uncover the etymology of the Kallawaya lexicon, i.e. it will be investigated which languages, apart from Pukina, contributed to the lexicon of Kallawaya. Furthermore, a classification of the so-called lexical manipulations will be undertaken. Lexical manipulations are ‘conscious’ manipulations of lexical items which serve to disguise the meaning of what is said and/or to signal in-group identity (see Bakker and Mous 1994: 9; Mous 2003: 209). Finally, although the grammar of Kallawaya derives mainly from Quechua, it also contains elements that are clearly of non-Quechua origin. An analysis of these grammatical elements will also be attempted.

Contact: Dr. Katja Hannß

Das Karaimische gehört zum kiptschakischen Zweig der türkischen Sprachfamilie. Seit Jahrhunderten in nicht-türkischer Umgebung (Polen, Litauen) gesprochen, ist die Sprache von indogermanischen Kontaktsprachen außerordentlich stark beeinflußt. Die auffälligsten "untürkischen" Besonderheiten des Karaimischen betreffen morphosyntaktische Eigenschaften wie die Bezeichnung des natürlichen Geschlechts durch ein Suffix (etwa in qarayqa 'Karaimin' gegenüber qaray 'Karaime') und die Verwendung von Demonstrativa als bestimmter Artikel sowie insbesondere Merkmale der Wortstellung: Verwendung von ursprünglichen Postpositionen als Präpositionen, nachgestellte Genitivattribute, nachgestellte Nebensätze mit Konjunktionen, relativ freie Stellung des finiten Verbs usw. Auf der anderen Seite hat das Karaimische eine Reihe archaischer Züge bewahrt.

Das Karaimische ist heute eine stark vom Aussterben bedrohte Sprache, die nur noch von sehr wenigen älteren Sprechern in zwei kleinen Minoritätengemeinschaften gesprochen wird. Zwei verschiedene Dialekte sind noch in Gebrauch, der Südwestdialekt, der noch von sieben Personen in der karaimischen Gemeinde in Polen zur täglichen Kommunikation verwendet wird, und der Nordwestdialekt, der von etwas mehr Sprechern in der litauischen Gemeinde benutzt wird.

Gegenstand des Projekts ist die Dokumentation und linguistische Analyse der gesprochenen Formen beider Dialekte auf der Basis intensiver Feldforschung mit den Sprechern beider Gemeinschaften. Eine große Anzahl von Texten des Nordwestdialekts wurde aufgenommen, transkribiert und analysiert; in der letzten Projektphase ergänzt durch Tonband- und Videoaufnahmen von ethnolinguistischem Textmaterial aus dem Südwestdialekt.

'Das Nomen im Lexikon' ist Teil des Sonderforschungsbereichs 'Theorie des Lexikons' (SFB 282, THEOLEX), eines Gemeinschaftsprojekts der Universitäten Düsseldorf, Köln und Wuppertal. Das genannte Projekt untersucht zwei Hauptaspekte bezüglich der Kategorie 'Nomen':

1. Die Beziehung zwischen der lexikalischen Kategorie 'Nomen' und der lexikalischen Kategorie 'Verb'

2. Die Beziehung zwischen der lexikalischen Kategorie 'Nomen' und der syntaktischen Kategorie 'NP'

Diesen Fragen wird von dem Projekt anhand eines typologischen Vergleichs eines ausgewählten Samples verschiedener Sprachen nachgegangen. Besondere Berücksichtigung fanden bisher Irokesisch (Cayuga), Tonganisch, Vietnamesisch, Japanisch, Arabisch, Nama (Khoekhoe), Indonesisch, Swahili, Lakota, Nunggubuyu und Kayardild. Der theoretische Schwerpunkt lag bisher darauf, herauszufinden, welche Kriterien zur Definition der Kategorie 'Nomen' notwendig sind, ob die Nomen/Verb-Distinktion universal ist oder nicht, in welchem Maße die lexikalische Kategorisierung unabhängig von der syntaktischen sein kann und welche grammatischen bzw. funktionalen Kategorien konstitutiv für die NP sind.

Project DFG

Movima is a genetically unclassified language spoken in the Moxos region in the savannahs of the Bolivian Amazon area. It is still spoken by more than 1,000 people. Most speakers are over 50 years old and bilingual in Spanish. In remote areas there are still a few children who learn the language; elsewhere, the children are raised in Spanish only. Today, efforts are being made to implement the language at schools.

Contact: Dr. Katharina Haude

University of Cologne (UoC) Postdoc Grant, Excellency Initiative

This project is funded by a UoC PostDoc Grant, one of the funding lines of the Excellence Initiative at the University of Cologne. The aim of this project is to investigate complex nominal and verbal expressions which are a-hierarchical (or "multi-headed") in a semantic and syntactic sense to a far reaching extent. We take a cross-categorial, comparative approach in order to enquire into similarities and differences of a-hierarchicality in the nominal and verbal domain. The languages under investigation are Vedic Sanskrit where we look at complex nominal expressions, and the Austronesian language Wooi (which is being documented in another project at Cologne University), where we examine serial verb constructions.

Contact: Uta Reinöhl

PAGE is a project funded by the Volkswagenstiftung within the research framework ‚Prosody of the Wider World’. The aim of the project is to establish re-usable infrastructure at laboratories in Europe and in the field for investigating the extent to which participants in a dialogue entrain to (imitate) each other in dialogues. The principal investigators include researchers from Germany, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, U.S.A. The analysis will be based on both acoustic and video-recordings for the purposes of investigating the integration of, and entrainment to, both speech and body-movements. The languages to be investigated include Dutch, Maltese and three Papuan languages.

Contact: Dr. Sonja Riesberg

The RHIM project explores morphosyntactic systems that are based on a hierarchy of referents – first and second person ranking over third, humans over non-humans, and known referents over unknown ones. This hierarchy is known to influence the structure of grammatical relations (the basic “who does what to whom in an event”), giving rise to e.g. inverse morphology or differential argument marking.

Contact: Dr. Katharina Haude

Das Projekt 'Schnittstelle Lexikon/Syntax: Prädikative Nominalphrasen' ist Teil des Sonderforschungsbereichs 'Theorie des Lexikons' (SFB 282, THEOLEX), eines Gemeinschaftsprojekts der Universitäten Düsseldorf, Köln und Wuppertal.

Das genannte Projekt untersucht lexikontheoretische Aspekte des Konstruktionstyps 'Kopula + Nominalphrase' und damit einen begrenzten Teilbereich von Prädikativkonstruktionen. Der für das Lexikon relevante Aspekt besteht darin, daß die Kopula bei dieser Konstruktion in die Subklasse von Verben einzuordnen ist, die kein echtes, sich auf einen Partizipanten beziehendes internes Argument selegieren, sondern ein Argument, das eine Eigenschaft denotiert (Quasi-Argument). Damit ergeben sich für das Lexikon zwei relevante Aspekte:

1. Die Besonderheiten der Verben, die ein solches Quasi-Argument selegieren,

2. die Beschränkungen, die sich hinsichtlich dieser prädikativen NPs/DPs im Vergleich zu    nichtprädikativen NPs/DPs ergeben (potentielles Vorkommen von Determinierern und deren Besonderheiten, Verhalten einzelner nominaler Subklassen als Kopf eines prädikativen Ausdrucks).

Die methodische Grundlage bildet die Erstellung einer Datensammlung für drei typologisch unterschiedliche Sprachen (Griechisch, Finnisch, Vietnamesisch).

Project DFG

Gegenstand der Untersuchung ist die gesprochene Sprache in Form von spontan erzählten Texten. Untersucht werden soll, wie und durch welche Mittel diese Texte als Texte konstituiert sind. Dabei gehen wir von der Hypothese aus, daß insbesondere Raumorientierung, Zeitstruktur und Topikmanagement konstituierend für Texte sind. Mit welchen sprachlichen Mitteln diese Verfahren in den einzelnen Sprachen realisiert werden, wird zunächst in einzelsprachlichen Textanalysen untersucht. Auf diese Weise sollen Parameter entwickelt werden, anhand derer Texte miteinander zu vergleichen sind. Die so gefundenen Ergebnisse werden dann mit den typologischen Eigenschaften der verschiedenen Sprachen korreliert werden, um so eine Basis für eine Typologie der gesprochenen Sprache zu schaffen.

Grundlage der Untersuchung ist ein Korpus von gesprochenen Texten in mehreren Sprachen: Deutsch, Samoanisch, Norwegisch, Spanisch, Lasisch, Türkisch, Ik, Ee, Ungarisch und Estnisch.

Das Arbeitsprogramm gliedert sich in einen korpusbezogenen Teil, bei dem es um die Aufbereitung von Texten und die Erstellung von Software geht, und einen textanalytischen Teil, in dem einzelne Bereiche der Grammatik auf ihre Diskursfunktion hin untersucht werden. Im derzeitigen Bewilligungszeitraum steht für den ersten Bereich vor allem die Frage der Textsegmentierung im Vordergrund. Der andere Schwerpunkt der Arbeit ist die einzelsprachliche Analyse, wobei insbesondere die Verfahren der Raum- und Zeitkennzeichnung untersucht werden. Wir erhoffen uns Ergebnisse in zweierlei Hinsicht. Zum einen erwarten wir Erkenntnisse über die jeweiligen einzelsprachlichen Verfahren, so daß dies auch als Beitrag zur Beschreibung dieser Sprachen angesehen werden kann. Zum anderen erwarten wir Aufschluß über die besondere textkonstituierende Funktion dieser Verfahren. Auf der Grundlage insbesondere der letzteren Erkenntnisse sollen dann im weiteren Verlauf des Projekts die für einen typologischen Vergleich von Sprachen notwendigen Parameter entwickelt werden.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Fritz Serzisko, Dr. Isabel Compes

Follow-up projekt on "Erstellung eines typologischen Profils der bolivianischen Mischsprache Kallawaya"

Kallawaya is a mixed and secret language spoken in the Charazani region of north-western Bolivia. As a mixed language, Kallawaya takes its lexicon and grammar from different and genetically unrelated languages. The lexicon of Kallawaya is mainly provided by Pukina, now extinct, while the grammar derives from a Southern Quechua variety. Kallawaya is also a secret language, used only by traditional herbalists during healing ceremonies; as such, it is not designed for use in everyday communication and has a reduced lexicon.The language is acquired only as L2, while the native language of the Kallawaya herbalists is Quechua.

Today, Kallawaya is highly endangered; the number of its speakers is yet unknown. The project seeks to uncover the etymology of the Kallawaya lexicon, i.e. it will be investigated which languages, apart from Pukina, contributed to the lexicon of Kallawaya. Furthermore, a classification of the so-called lexical manipulations will be undertaken. Lexical manipulations are ‘conscious’ manipulations of lexical items which serve to disguise the meaning of what is said and/or to signal in-group identity (see Bakker and Mous 1994: 9; Mous 2003: 209). Finally, although the grammar of Kallawaya derives mainly from Quechua, it also contains elements that are clearly of non-Quechua origin. An analysis of these grammatical elements will also be attempted.

Contact: Dr. Katja Hannß