• 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.

   

• LingCologne 2025: Call for Posters

  We invite abstracts for poster presentations that contribute to the conference theme of "Feedback in Interaction". See our conference website for more details.

   

• 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

• Bonmann, Svenja. 2024. Zum Ursprung des sog. ā-Konjunktivs des Latino-Faliskischen, Sabellischen und Venetischen. Glotta. Zeitschrift für griechische und lateinische Sprache 100(2), 246–287.

• Suter, Edgar 2024. Benefactive constructions: A comparative study of the Huon Peninsula languages. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 42. 128–202.

• Hill, Eugen, Simon Fries, Natalie Korobzow, Laura Günther & Svenja Bonmann. 2024. Towards a New Reconstruction of the Proto‑Yeniseian Sound System. Part II: Word‑Final Consonants. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 6(2), 216–293.

• Wiemer, Björn, Eugen Hill, Daniel Kölligan & Jan-Niklas Linnemeier. 2024. Between the birth and death of future tenses. Related languages as a natural lab for research into grammatical change (LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 58). München: LINCOM EUROPA.

• Fries, Simon and Natalie Korobzow. 2024. On the dating of sound changes and its implications for language relationship. The case of Proto-Yeniseian *p- > Ket h-, Yugh f-. Diachronica 41(4). 525–555. (Online first).

• Coenen, Pascal. 2024. Non-canonical quantification in Old Persian: The adverb vasai̯. Folia Linguistica.

• Bonmann, Svenja, Sonja Riesberg & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2024. Differential object marking in Western Malayo-Polynesian symmetrical voice languages. Linguistic Typology.

• Halfmann, Jakob, Svenja Bonmann, Simon Fries & Natalie Korobzow. 2023. A New Reading of the Bactrian Part of the Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual (DN I). Indo-Iranian Journal 67(1), 5–51.

• Fries, Simon & Svenja Bonmann. 2023. The Development of Arin kul ‘water’ ~ Kott ûl, Ket ¹u·l’, Yugh ¹ur and Its Typological Background. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 5(2), 183–198.

• Fries, Simon, Jakob Halfmann, Eugen Hill & Denise Hübner. 2023. From noun to future tense. The functional diachrony of the l-future in the Nuristani languages and its typological background. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 76(1), 53–85.

• Bonmann, Svenja, Jakob Halfmann, Natalie Korobzow & Bobomullo Bobomulloev. 2023. A Partial Decipherment of the Unknown Kushan Script. Transactions of the Philological Society 121(2). 293–329.