Welcome to the section of General Linguistics!

• Nachruf Dr. Werner Drossard†

• Konzept bietet Rahmen für multimodale Datenerhebung in den Sprachwissenschaften

  In einem interdisziplinärem Forschungsteam hat Dr. Anastasia Bauer mitgewirkt einen Workflow zu entwickeln, der durch die Integration nicht-sprachlicher Informationen die Erforschung von Sprache und Kommunikation verbessern soll.

   

• ZEIT Article: “Verstummt und vergessen”

  Article about endangered languages and interview with Birgit Hellwig in ZEIT Nr. 08/2026.

   

• Kushan script featured in Terra X

  A media tip for anyone following the discoveries surrounding the Kushan script: in this episode of Terra X on ZDF, Svenja Bonmann and her colleagues report on their deciphering of this script (from approx. minute 17:19). They then head to a mountain range in Tajikistan to recover and evaluate further characters carved into rocks. They are accompanied by a Tajik archaeologist and local civil protection authorities. Watch it on 1 March at 7:30 p.m. on ZDF and now in the media library (in German).

   

• Presentation: Vereinbarkeit von generativer KI und Lehre

  Elen Le Foll and Eva Scheel-Huber gave a presentation on the compatibility of generative AI and teaching on February 4, 2026, as part of the UzK Competence Days “KI in der Hochschulbildung.”

   

• EU-financed project on „Conversational Storytelling“

  On November 1st 2025, “STORYTEL - At the roots of multimodality: Learning from smartphone-based audiovisual recordings of conversational storytelling”, will launch. This three year Erasmus+ project is coordinated by the University of Cologne and involves the University of Bologna, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the University of Murcia. The scientific and administrative team in Cologne includes: Anna Bonifazi (project manager, IfL DL),  Sonja Gipper (IfL ASW), Martine Grice (IfL Phonetik), Sandra Debreslioska(IfL DL), Juman Al-qaoud (IfL DL), Madeleine Frings (IfL DL), Felix Rau (DCH), Øyvind Eide (IHD), Lüder Schmidt (FG1) and Nina Kind (D7).

   

• Millions in funding for research into indigenous languagest

  The Volkswagen Foundation is funding a project by Dr. Svenja Bonmann to analyse an unknown Central American writing system and attempt to assign it to a language / Approximately one million euros in funding over three years.

   

News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics

• Hellwig, Birgit, Evan Kidd & Serge Sagna. 2026. The Acquisition of African Languages: Introduction to the Special Issue. First Language: Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237261451306.
• Huber, Eva, Balthasar Bickel & Sabine Stoll.2026. Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach. Open Mind; 10 641–672.
• Riesberg, Sonja, Uta Reinöhl & Birgit Hellwig (eds.). 2026. The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.240.
• Bauer, Anastasia, Patrick C. Trettenbrein, Federica Amici, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Lisa-Marie Krause, Anna Kuder, Silva Ladewig, Marc Schulder, Petra Schumacher, Door Spruijt, Chiara Zulberti, Susanne Fuchs, and Martin Schulte-Rüther. 2026. Data Collection in Multimodal Language and Communication Research: A Flexible Decision Framework. Advance in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 9(2). DOI: .
• Compes, Isabel & Jane Oduor (eds.). 2026. Special Issue on the 16th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium of the University of Nairobi Journal of Language and Linguistics (UoNJLL) 12.
• Compes, Isabel & Jane Oduor. 2026. Introduction. In: Isabel Compes & Jane Oduor (eds.). Special Issue on the 16th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium of the University of Nairobi Journal of Language and Linguistics (UoNJLL) 12, 1–5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66563/uonjll.v12i.3362.
• Omda Ibrahim Elnur, Elsadig & Isabel Compes. 2026. Tone Marking on Beria Verbs. In: Isabel Compes & Jane Oduor (eds.). Special Issue on the 16th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium of the University of Nairobi Journal of Language and Linguistics (UoNJLL) 12, 34–58. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66563/uonjll.v12i.3347.
• Gipper, Sonja. 2026. Trajectories of request for reconfirmation sequences in Yurakaré: Do repeats reduce information rate in conversation? Journal of Pragmatics 254: 64–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2025.11.006.
• Gipper, Sonja, T. Mark Ellison, Tobias-Alexander Herrmann, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Petra B. Schumacher & Sophie Repp. 2026. Why ellipsis? Interactional function predicts choice of syntactic form in conversation. Dialogue & Discourse 17(1): 54–88. https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2026.102.
• Compensis, Paul, Marco García García, Birgit Hellwig, Sonja Riesberg & Gertrud Schneider-Blum. 2026. Differential argument marking and discourse prominence. Studies in Language. Online first. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.23060.pau.
• Bauer, Anastasia, Sonja Gipper, Tobias-Alexander Herrmann, and Jana Hosemann. 2026. Rethinking Linguistic Feedback: A Modality-Agnostic and Holistic Approach to Multimodal Addressee Signals in Spoken and Signed Dyadic Interaction. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 11(1): 18539. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.18539.
• Walker, Katherine & Eva van Lier. 2026. A crosslinguistic study of conditions on argument indexing. Linguistics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2024-0091.
• Evans, Nicholas, Danielle Barth, Wayan Arka, Henrik Bergqvist, Christian Döhler, Sonja Gipper, Yukinori Kimoto, Dominique Knuchel, Daniel Majchrzak, Hitomi Ōno, Eka Pratiwi, Saskia van Putten, Andrea C. Schalley, Asako Shiohara, Stefan Schnell & Yanti. 2025. Is complementation a universal strategy? A cross-linguistic corpus study. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 5(2): 66–104. https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2785-0943/21288.