• Book premiere: Atlas der vom Aussterben bedrohten Sprachen

  GBS board member Stefan Schnell and Zeit editor Arnfrid Schenk have published an ‘Atlas der vom Aussterben bedrohten Sprachen’. The book launch will take place on 30 March 2025 from 6 pm at the Wohngemeinschaft. The proceeds from the event organised by DuMont Buchverlag will be donated to GBS. Tickets and further information on how to get there can be found directly on the Wohngemeinschaft website. We look forward to the exchange on site!

   

• Vacancy Student Assistant (IT)

  The Department of Linguistics (General and Historical-Comparative Linguistics) has an immediate vacancy for a SHK or WHB in the IT area (between 9 and 19 hours per week). Please send applications in digital form to Dr Claudia Wegener (claudia.wegener[at]uni-koeln.de).

   

• LingCologne 2025: 22–23 May

  We cordially invite all interested parties to participate in LingCologne 2025, which will take place this year on 22 and 23 May 2025 under the theme ‘Feedback in Interaction’. 

   

• Dr. Svenja Bonmann admitted to Junges Kolleg

  We congratulate Dr. Svenja Bonmann, who will be accepted as a fellow of the Young Academy (Junges Kolleg) of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Arts (Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste) on 1 January 2025. The fellowship not only offers financial freedom for her own research, but the admission is also an important honour that enables exchange with other excellent young researchers.

   

• DFG approves third funding phase for the CRC

  Congratulations on the third funding phase of the CRC Prominence in Language! Some of our department members are involved in sub-projects. Project B02 (sub-project leader Prof. Dr. Birgit Hellwig) investigates the encoding of participles in two East African languages with case splits and word order variation. Project B05 (sub-project leader Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Himmelmann and Dr. Sonja Riesberg) is researching prominence-related structures in languages with symmetrical diatheses and in Papuan languages, B08 (project leader Prof. Dr. Eugen Hill) focuses on Differential Object Marking in Nuristani, and project C09 (sub-project leader Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Himmelmann) is conducting mathematical and computer-aided research into explanatory approaches for phenomena of form and discourse prominence.

   

• Vice Dean for International Affairs: Prof. Birgit Hellwig

  Prof. Birgit Hellwig has been elected Vice Dean for International Affairs of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities for the term of office from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2028. Congratulations!

   

• The Unimagazin publishes article about the fieldwork at the Department of Linguistics

  The Unimagazin reports in its article “When words are lost” from Octobre 17th 2024, on the fieldwork of our linguists Professor Dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Dr. Maria Bardají and Dr. Claudia Wegener. They document previously undescribed languages in close cooperation with native speakers. There are often only a few native speakers of these languages left and it is particularly important to treat them and the data collected with respect and trust. You can access the entire article via the link in the title.

   

• Honourable mention for Maria Bardaji's dissertation

  At the Greenberg Award 2024 of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), Maria Bardaji's dissertation Nominalization in Totoli and other western Austronesian languages was awarded an Honourable Mention. Her dissertation was published by Pacific Linguistics: "Bardaji’s thesis is concerned with the relationship between nominalizations and symmetrical voice constructions in Austronesian languages. Bardaji’s thesis combines folk tales, explanatory texts, community events, musical events, stimuli tasks and elicitation to answer important theoretical questions. It represents an impressive integration of language documentation and linguistic typology. In addition to this, the committee felt that the thesis made novel contributions to documentary/descriptive methodology in relation to typology by probing the notion of at-issue content in these languages in a systematic way."
  Congratulations!

News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics

• Çabuk‐Ballı, Sakine, Jekaterina Mazara, Aylin C. Küntay, Birgit Hellwig, Barbara B. Pfeiler, Paul Widmer & Sabine Stoll. 2025. Negation in first language acquisition: Universal or language-specific? Cognitive Science 49. e70044.
• Hellwig, Birgit. 2024. Caused accompanied motion in a direction: BRING and TAKE in Katla (Niger-Congo, Sudan). In James Essegbey & Enoch Aboh (eds), Predication in African languages, 238-262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Laureck, Lukas. 2024. Three-participant events in the Wagi dialect of Beria. Studies in African Linguistics 53(1). 97-119.
• Walker, Katherine. 2024. Conditional Indexing. Amsterdam: LOT.
• Dekker, Peter, Sonja Gipper & Bart de Boer. 2024. Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: Evidence form agent-based modelling. Linguistics Vanguard.
• Bonifazi, Anna und Pinelopi Ioannidou. (erscheinend) 2024. Cross- and multimodal anaphoric references in mystery movies: a cognitive approach. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 12. 229–258.
• Kapitonov, Ivan & Margit Bowler. 2024. Some or other: Partitive disanaphors across languages. Journal of Semantics 41(3–4). 245–277.
• Suter, Edgar. 2024. Benefactive constructions: A comparative study of the Huon Peninsula languages. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 42. 128–202.
• Bonmann, Svenja, Sonja Riesberg & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2024. Differential object marking in Western Malayo-Polynesian symmetrical voice languages. Linguistic Typology.