Welcome to the section of General Linguistics!
graphic slider element
-
-
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.
-
Conference "Vertrauen in der Wissenskommunikation" (Grimme-Forschungskolleg and SSLAC)
Prof. Himmelmann in a discussion on "Uncertain knowledge and trust. How do they go together?"
-
The Acquisition Sketch Project
-
SFB 1252 "Prominence in Language"
Our GL and HCL departments are involved in a total of 6 projects in the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB).
-
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.
-
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
PhD position available
A PhD position is available for the Documenting Languages and Ethnobiological Knowledge (DocuLEK) project, funded jointly by the French and German research agencies (ANR-DFG).
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.
News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics
Current Publications
- Passmore, Sam, Birgit Hellwig, Rowena Garcia & Evan Kidd. 2025. The scientific and cultural cost of convenience sampling in the face of rising language endangerment: Highlighting the role of language acquisition. Open Mind 9. 501–514.
- Bauer, Anastasia, Patrick C Trettenbrein, Federica Amici, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Susanne Fuchs, Lisa-Marie Krause, Anna Kuder, et al. 2025. Data Collection in Multimodal Language and Communication Research: A Flexible Decision Framework. (Preprint)
- 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.