SSLAC
The Key Profile Area Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition develops and coordinates collaborative research in the Language Sciences at the University of Cologne.
Welcome to the section of General Linguistics!
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Conference "Vertrauen in der Wissenskommunikation" (Grimme-Forschungskolleg and SSLAC)
Prof. Himmelmann in a discussion on "Uncertain knowledge and trust. How do they go together?"
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CCLS Lecture Series
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Lunch & Linguistics
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The Acquisition Sketch Project
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SFB 1252 "Prominence in Language"
Our GL and HCL departments are involved in a total of 6 projects in the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB).
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Cologne research group deciphers enigmatic script from antiquity
Much of what is known today about the Kushan Empire and its inhabitants comes from Chinese, Greek or Roman sources. Until now, no one has been able to read some of the written testimonies of this Central Asian culture, because the writing system in which they were written had not been deciphered. The Cologne linguists Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow have now made a breakthrough: the riddle of the unknown Kushana script has been solved.
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IG-AT 2023 "Lautwandel und morphologische Analogie"
From 12.09.2023 to 14.09.2023 the working conference of the Indo-Germanic Society (Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft) was hosted by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Cologne.
News
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Lunch & Linguistics in winter term 2023/24
On October 18, 2023, the CCLS Lunch & Linguistics lecture series will start, where young researchers (from advanced Master and PhD students to post-docs) can present and discuss their research projects and network with researchers from different fields of linguistics. You are very welcome to participate!
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CCLS Lecture Series in winter term 2023/24
The lecture series of the Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS) starts on October 16, 2023. This semester there will again be many interesting lectures on different research fields of linguistics. Here you can find the program of the CCLS Lecture Series in the winter term 2023/24 as well as further information.
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Cologne research group deciphers enigmatic script from antiquity
Much of what is known today about the Kushan Empire and its inhabitants comes from Chinese, Greek or Roman sources. Until now, no one has been able to read some of the written testimonies of this Central Asian culture, because the writing system in which they were written had not been deciphered. The Cologne linguists Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow have now made a breakthrough: the riddle of the unknown Kushana script has been solved.
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Maria Bardají i Farré as guest of Radio Republik Indonesia Tolitoli
At an interactive dialogue titled "TANTANGAN DAN UPAYA PELESTARIAN BAHASA DAERAH" (Challenges and efforts for the preservation of regional languages), Maria Bardají i Farré spoke about the Western Austronesian language Totoli on July 26, 2023.
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The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted Professor Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, General Linguistics, a Reinhart Koselleck Project
Entitled "Taking Spoken Language Seriously / Gesprochene Sprache ernst nehmen," the project will address the question of the relevance of spoken language properties for grammatical analysis over a period of five years. The funding amount is one million euros. Reinhart Kosseleck projects are awarded exclusively to researchers whose curriculum vitae is distinguished by outstanding scientific achievements. Funding is provided for particularly innovative and, in a positive sense, risk-taking research.
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The Acquisition Sketch Project
The Acquisition Sketch Project is an initiative aimed at expanding knowledge about the acquisition of little-studied languages. Combining findings from child language acquisition and language documentation, the project provides a detailed description of how to collect data and write an "acquisition sketch" of a language based on just 5 hours of naturalistic data.
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Indogermanische Gesellschaft: Prizes for the best theses
Since 2011, the Indo-European Society has awarded annual prizes for the best final theses in Indo-European studies worldwide. For the year 2022, Svenja Bonmann won 2nd place with her dissertation Parametric Syntactic Reconstruction. Noun Phrases in Iranian, Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-European (Supervision: Eugen Hill, Daniel Kölligan & Agnes Korn). Leo Rennert's master's thesis Die pronominalen Endungen der germanischen Adjektivflexion: Althochdeutsch (Supervision: Eugen Hill) received 3rd place. We congratulate both of them very much!
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Wilhelm von Humboldt Award to Maria Bardají
During this year's annual conference, Maria Bardají i Farré was awarded the Wilhelm von Humboldt Award for Young Academics of the German Linguistic Society. This is the most important award for young linguists in the German-speaking world. Congratulations!
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Prof. Himmelmann as guest on the podcast Theory Neutral
In the January 08, 2023 episode, Prof. Himmelmann talks about discursive demonstrative functions and his article "Demonstratives in Narrative Discourse: A Taxonomy of Universal Uses" (1996).
News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics
Current Publications
- Gipper, Sonja & Alexandra Groß. 2023. "Less than Confirming, and Doing More than That: Comparing Responses to Requests for Confirmation in German and Yurakaré". Contrastive Pragmatics (published online ahead of print 2023), 1-45. https://doi.org/10.1163/26660393-bja10100.
- Gipper, Sonja, Katharina König & Kathrin Weber. 2023. Structurally Similar Formats are Not Functionally Equivalent across Languages: Requests for Reconfirmation in Comparative Perspective. Contrastive Pragmatics (published online ahead of print 2023).
- Aung Si & Aung Kyawphyo. 2023. Patterns in fish naming ability in two fishing communities of Myanmar. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 19, 34.
- Bowler, Margit & Ivan Kapitonov. 2023. Quantification. in Claire Bowern (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, 499-512. OUP.
- Hellwig, Birgit, Shanley E. M. Allen, Lucinda Davidson, Rebecca Defina, Barbara F. Kelly & Evan Kidd (eds). 2023. The acquisition sketch project.
- Bauer, Anastasia. 2023. Schriftsprache und Mundbild in der Russischen Gebärdensprache. DAS ZEICHEN 37:120, 81-149.
- Constantijn Kaland, Marc Swerts & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2023. Red and blue bananas: Time-series f0 analysis of contrastively focused noun phrases in Papuan Malay and Dutch. Journal of Phonetics 96, 1–20.
- Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2023. On the comparability of prosodic categories: why ‘stress’ is difficult. Linguistic Typology 27(2): 341-361.
- Bonmann, Svenja. 2022. Word-internal "thorn"-clusters and the dative singular of the PIE 1st person pronoun, Historische Sprachforschung 135(1), 43-74.
- Hellwig, Birgit. 2022. Language acquisition and language socialization. In Svenja Völkel & Nico Nassenstein (eds.), Approaches to Language and Culture, 33–52. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Gipper, Sonja. 2022. Assertive content questions in Yurakaré conversations: Using indisputable facts to justify disputable claims, actions, and stances. Journal of Pragmatics 202: 28–47.
- Primus†, Beatrice, Franziska Kretzschmar, Klaus von Heusinger & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2022. Relating agent prominence to discourse prominence: DO-clefts in German. Linguistics 60(6): 1811–1853.
- Frye, Henrike, Shirley Balar & Aung Si. 2022. Experiences with remote linguistic-ethnobiological fieldwork on bird names in the Qaqet language of Papua New Guinea. Language Documentation & Conservation 16, 341–363.
- Frye, Henrike. 2022. Child-directed Speech in Qaqet: A Language of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Canberra: ANU Press.
- Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. & Sonja Riesberg. 2022. Expressions of directed caused accompanied motion events in Totoli, a Western Austronesian language of Indonesia. In Anna Margetts, Birgit Hellwig & Sonja Riesberg (eds.), Caused accompanied motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 219–242.
- Bressem, Jana & Claudia Wegener. 2022. Handling talk. Gesture 20(2), 219–253.
- Margetts, Anna, Sonja Riesberg & Birgit Hellwig (eds.). 2022. Caused Accompanied Motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.