Welcome to the section of Historical Comparative Linguistics!
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Wilhelm von Humboldt Preis geht an Maria Bardají
Der Wilhelm von Humboldt-Preis 2023 für den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs wurde bei der 45. Jahrestagung der DGfS an Maria Bardají verliehen.
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DGfS 2023
Plenarvortrag von Prof. Himmelmann auf der Jahrestagung der DGfS 2023 zum Thema "Creativity and routine at the prosody-syntax interface: playing with intonation unit boundaries"
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SFB 1252 "Prominence in Language"
Unsere Abteilungen ASW und HVS sind an insgesamt 6 Projekten des Sonderforschungsbereichs beteiligt.
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SSLAC
Die Key Profile Area Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition entwickelt und koordiniert Verbundforschung in den Language Sciences an der Universität zu Köln.
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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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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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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.
Congratulations!
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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
- 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.
- Coenen, Pascal. 2023. A New Interpretation of the Vedic Particle aṅgá. Bhasha. Journal of South Asian Linguistics, Philology and Grammatical Traditions 2(1). 143–220.
- Fries, Simon. 2023. On the origin of Greek first person singular optatives in -οιμι, their relation to Church Slavonic optatives in -ěmь, and the original function of primary and secondary endings in Proto-Indo-European. Die Sprache 55. 95–152.
- Fries, Simon. 2023[2021]. Why and How Do New Tense Formations Arise? – On the Emergence of the Vedic So-Called Periphrastic tā́-Future. Historische Sprachforschung 134. 96–165.
- Bonmann, Svenja, Simon Fries, Natalie Korobzow, Laura Günther & Eugen Hill. 2023. Towards a New Reconstruction of the Proto-Yeniseian Sound System. Part I: Word-Initial Consonants. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 5. 39–82.
- Casaretto, Antje. 2022. Adverbien mit lokaler Semantik im Rigveda. In Becker, Kristina, Harald Bichlmeier, Daniel Kölligan, Tiziana Quadrio & Theresa Roth (Hrsgg.), Συντακτικός. Studien zur historischen Syntax, Pragmatik und Etymologie der indogermanischen Sprachen. Gedenkschrift für Heinrich Hettrich, 65–87. Hamburg: Baar.
- Coenen, Pascal. 2020–2021 [2022]. The functions of the Old Persian particle =ci. Die Sprache 54. 13–94.
- Daues, Alexandra. 2022. Zum Prohibitiv im Hethitischen: Präventive und inhibitive Funktion. In Kristina Becker, Harald Bichlmeier, Daniel Kölligan, Tiziana Quadrio & Theresa Roth (Hrsgg.), Συντακτικός. Studien zur historischen Syntax, Pragmatik und Etymologie der indogermanischen Sprachen. Gedenkschrift für Heinrich Hettrich, 101–117. Hamburg: Baar.
- Frotscher, Michael, Eugen Hill & Daniel Kölligan. 2022. Clitics in morphology – morphology of clitics. In Florian Sommer, Karin Stüber, Paul Widmer & Yoko Yamazaki (Hrsgg.), Indogermanische Morphologie in erweiterter Sicht: Grenzfälle und Übergänge, 184–233. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.
- Fries, Simon. 2022. Über die Herkunft der langvokalischen Konjunktive des Typs hom. ἐθέλωμι, ἐθέλῃσθα, ἐθέλῃσι. Glotta 98. 148–173.
- Fries, Simon & Eugen Hill. 2022. Insights Into the Diachrony Of the East Baltic Subjunctive Mood. Baltistica 57(1). 5–44.
- Fries, Simon. 2022. Über die Variation bū́tų ~ bū́t und mū́sų, jū́sų ~ mū́s, jū́s bei Christian Donelaitis. Archivum Lithuanicum 24. 27–56.
- Fries, Simon. 2022. Über die Variation bū́tų ~ bū́t und mū́sų, jū́sų ~ mū́s, jū́s im Litauischen und ihren Hintergrund in den prosodischen Verhältnissen des Urostbaltischen. Baltu filoloģija 31(2). 4–47.