• Nikolaus P. Himmelmann awarded Labex EFL International Chair 2024

  Congratulations to Professor Nikolaus P. Himmelmann on the award of a Labex EFL International Chair. Within the framework of the chair, professor Himmelmann will give a series of four seminars on the theme of Taking spoken language seriously in Paris in March of 2024. The International Labex EFL Chair of the Laboratoire d’excellence “Fondements Empiriques de la Linguistique” honors academics of high international distinction in their field. The next seminar ("One grammar or two?") will be held on April 24. The lecture can also be attended online. All lectures are also available to stream for longer periods. Click here for more information.

• Lunch & Linguistics in summer term 2024

   

  On April 16, 2024, 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! Click here for further information.

• CCLS Lecture Series in summer term 2024

  The lecture series of the Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS) starts on April 15, 2024. 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 summer term 2024 as well as further information.

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• Research team from Cologne University deciphers curious enigmatic writing from antiquity

  Much of what is known today about the Kushana empire and its inhabitants comes from Chinese, Greek or Roman sources. Until now, no one has been able to read some of the written records of this Central Asian culture, as the writing system in which they were written had not been deciphered. The Cologne linguists Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow have now achieved a breakthrough: the mystery of the unknown Kushana script has been solved.  
  The Cologne University Magazine also reports on this. 

• 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.  

• 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!

• 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.

News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics

• Kapitonov, Ivan. 2024. Onomatopoeia in Kunbarlang. In Körtvélyessy and Štekauer (eds.), Onomatopoeia in the World’s Languages. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111053226-022
• Halfmann, Jakob, Svenja Bonmann, Simon Fries & Natalie Korobzow. 2024. A New Reading of the Bactrian Part of the Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual (DN I), Indo-Iranian Journal 67 (1), 5-51. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15728536-06701005
• 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.
• Bonmann, Svenja. 2023. Parametric Syntactic Reconstruction. Noun Phrases in Iranian, Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-European. Dissertation, Universität zu Köln. URL: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/70764
• 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.