News
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Johanna Nichols to give talk at UZH on 24 April 2019, 14.00h
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Manuel Widmer to give talk in Vienna
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Mathias Jenny to teach workshop at the Yangon University of Foreign Languages
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Wei-Wei Lee and Rachel Weymuth gave talk in Helsinki
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Steven Moran to give co-authored presentation in Helsinki
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Newly advertised research positions at the Department of Comparative Linguistics
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An article by Nick Lester entitled, "That's hard: Relativizer use in spontaneous L2 speech" was just published in the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research.
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Publication in Science by author team including Damián Blasi, Steven Moran, Paul Widmer, and Balthasar Bickel
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Steven Moran and Daniel McCloy (eds.) publish PHOIBLE 2.0 database (phoible.org)
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Mathias Jenny, Hiram Ring, and André Müller to give talks at the AAS, Denver
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Co-authored publication by Chundra Cathcart selected for inclusion in "The Best of Language: Volume III"
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New volume on grammatical relations by Bickel and Witzlack-Makarevich
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Bickel joins editorial board of the Journal of Linguistics
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Nick Lester invited to teach courses at summer school
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Manuel Widmer gave invited talk in Tübingen
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Mathias Jenny to give two invited talks at the University of Yangon
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Department features at 32nd CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference with three posters
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Dagmar Jung presented her paper 'How to negate in Dene Suline' at SSILA/LSA
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New paper by Florian Sommer on the morphology of definiteness marking in Baltic (open access)
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Francesco Gardani to give talk at the 29th Congrès international de linguistique et philologie romanes in Copenhagen
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Francesco Gardani to give talk at ICHL24 in Canberra
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Florian Sommer defended PhD thesis
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Manuel Widmer to give presentation in Brussels
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Paul Widmer published paper on Tocharian
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Rik van Gijn receives ERC Consolidator grant
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The SNSF awards a 4-year SINERGIA grant “Out of Asia: Linguistic Diversity and Population History” to a consortium of GIScientists, geneticists and linguists, including IVS members Paul Widmer and Balthasar Bickel. The project will start next year.
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The Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Zurich, has signed an MoU with the Department of Linguistics, Yangon University of Foreign Languages, Myanmar.
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Master's program Evolutionary Linguistics approved by the Executive Board of the University of Zürich
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Steven Moran and Antonio Benítez-Burraco publish free Ebook "The Adaptive Value of Languages: Non-Linguistic Causes of Language Diversity"
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Steven Moran and Sabine Stoll presented their paper 'Variation sets in maximally diverse languages' at BUCLD
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Sabine Stoll gave talk at Neuroscience Center (U Geneva) on 'Language acquisition in maximally diverse languages'
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New paper: "Sanskrit Word Segmentation Using Character-level Recurrent and Convolutional Neural Networks". Authors: Oliver Hellwig and Sebastian Nehrdich (Hamburg)
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Manuel Widmer to give talk in Pavia
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New paper from Stuart Watson and Simon Townsend on the information content of wolf howls
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Michele Loporcaro, Francesco Gardani, and Alberto Giudici to give talk at Going Romance in Utrecht
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New paper by Francesco Gardani in Language and Linguistics Compass
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New SNSF grant on ergativity
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Francesco Gardani was elected member of the Executive Committee of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
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Damián Blasi taught a course on data science at NTNU
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Steven Moran and colleague published editorial "The Adaptive Value of Languages: Non-Linguistic Causes of Language Diversity" as part of their edited volume in Frontiers in Psychology
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New publications by Andreas Hölzl 2018
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Andreas Hölzl and colleague organized workshop on Tungusic language family at SLE51
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Pied babbler paper makes Editor’s Choice in Behavioral Ecology
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Sabine Stoll to give two talks at WEF Meeting of New Champions in Tianjin, China
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Paul Widmer gives talk at workshop in Lausanne co-organized by groups from the Sorbonne, UMR Orient & Mediterranée, U Lausanne, and IVS
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Steven Moran and colleagues organized workshop at SLE51
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Steven Moran, Sebastian Sauppe, Nicholas Lester and Sabine Stoll presented at SLE51
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Fieldwork activities and workshops at YUFL in connection with Mathias Jenny's project on Burmese TV
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New paper on the drivers of linguistic diversity in Proc Roy Soc B by Bickel and colleagues
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New paper on the evolution of syntax by department members in PLoS Biology
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Mathias Jenny giving talk at the 13th International Burma Studies Conference in Bangkok
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Bickel gives keynote at a conference on «Morphosyntactic Misfits»
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Steven Moran interviewed for the Language Science Press blog
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Steven Moran and Michael Cysouw have published open source book "The Unicode Cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles"
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New paper on 'Meaning-refining acoustic variation in pied babbler recruitment cries' by Sabrina Engesser, Simon Townsend, et al.
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Bickel to give a plenary at the conference “Typology and Universals in Word Formation IV”
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Mathias Jenny, Hiram Ring and Wei-Wei Lee to teach "Basics of field methods" at Yangon University of Foreign Languages and University of Mandalay (Myanmar)
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The Swiss Paippalāda Project to hold workshop in Zurich on 21/22 June 2018
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Chundra Cathcart to present paper at 34th South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable, June 21, in Konstanz, Germany
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Thomas Zehnder hält einen Gastvortrag auf der Indologie der Uni Tübingen
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Hiram Ring and Mathias Jenny gave a talk titled "Toward reconstruction of Austroasiatic syntax" at the 28th SEALS conference in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on May 17, 2018
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Nouns slow down speech: newly discovered universal of language processing published by Bickel and colleagues in PNAS
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Steven Moran to present three co-authored papers at 11th Edition of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) in Miyazaki, Japan
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Francesco Gardani to deliver plenary talk at the 13th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting
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Francesco Gardani gave a talk on “Verb aspect borrowing in Istro-Romanian” at Stony Brook University
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The following papers by Chundra Cathcart appeared:
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Several department members to present at 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG) in Torun, Poland
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Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer give keynote at "A corpus and usage-based approach to Ancient Greek: from the Archaic period until the Koiné"
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Sabine Stoll talks about Citizen Science in Linguistics
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Thematic issue edited by Katarzyna Janic et al. published
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Manuel Widmer interviewed by SRF on occasion of the International Mother Language Day
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Mathias Jenny to give invited talk Yangon University of Foreign Languages (YUFL)
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New project and two new colleagues at the IVS
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New publication co-authored by Paul Widmer on clause linkage in Middle Welsh
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Mathias Jenny organizes panel on "Changing Environments: Language and Society in Myanmar"
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New publication by Stefan Dedio and Paul Widmer on Old and Middle Irish
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Bickel, Stoll and Gardani lecturing at COEDL
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Bickel to give plenary at ALS Anniversary Conference
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Talks by department members at ALS
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Several talks by IVS members at ALT
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Mathias Jenny to give talk on "Verb initial structures as an archaic feature of Austroasiatic" at the ALT conference
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Mathias Jenny to give talk titled "In search of Austroasiatic - word order and clause structure" at University of Potsdam
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Sebastian Sauppe and Rik van Gijn receive funding for pilot project
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New publication by Paul Widmer on Tocharian
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National Geographic Explorer grant awarded to Sebastian Sauppe
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New paper by Sebastian Sauppe on German sentence production
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New research project sponsored by SNSF
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New book by Manuel Widmer
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DAI workshop to take place on 9 October 2017
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Vorträge von Mitgliedern des IVS auf dem "33. Deutschen Orientalistentag, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena"
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Stefan Dedio, Francesco Gardani, Peter Ranacher, Paul Widmer gave two talks at the workshop "New Approaches to Brittonic historical Linguistics"
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5'000 books into the NEBIS catalog until 31st August 2017
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“Borrowed Morphology”, edited by Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze, goes paperback
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Damián Blasi gave an invited talk at "Statistics of language: therories and experiments"
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New publication by Francesco Gardani
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Stefan Dedio, Manuel Widmer and Paul Widmer to give talks at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in San Antonio, Texas
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New publication by Manuel Widmer & Marius Zemp
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New paper from Simon Townsend on the dwarf mongoose alarm call system
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New paper from Sabrina Engesser and Simon Townsend on pied babbler call combinations
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Balthasar Bickel to give talk on the scope of evolutionary biases in language
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Charlotte Schweri defended PhD thesis
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New publication by Mathias Jenny
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Bickel to give a talk at an MPI Nijmegen workshop on new questions and methods in linguistics.
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Mathias Jenny to teach introductory courses in linguistics as visiting lecturer at the University of Mawlamyine, Myanmar.
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Talk by Bob Ladd and Stephan Schmid at PaPE
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Talks by Alys Boote Cooper and André Müller at the Chulalongkorn International Student Symposium on Southeast Asian Linguistics
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Mathias Jenny, Alys Boote Cooper & Paul Widmer gave talk at conference "Contact-driven multilingual practices"
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Talk by Stephan Schmid at ICLaVE 9
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AUTOTYP database released!
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Steven Moran gave a talk at the 25th Manchester Phonology Meeting
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Talk by Florian Sommer in Halle
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Stephan Schmid co-author of new paper on speech perception
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Damián Blasi gave invited talk at ENS
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New professor at the department: Welcome to Simon Townsend!
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New publication by Bickel on linguistic areas and universals
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Bickel and Derungs at Monte Verità Conference on Spatial Boundaries and Transitions
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Keynote by Damián Blasi at Paris-Sorbonne
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Florian Sommer giving invited talk in Bern
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IDG new paper
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Am 20. und 21. April halten mehrere Mitglieder des IVS Vorträge auf dem 3. Indogermanistischen Forschungskolloquium in Wien
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Library network 'Bibliotheksverbund Platte' launched! Improved opening hours (Mon-Fri, 9-17) and facilities for students and staff
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Inaugural talk by Mathias Jenny on "Southeast Asian linguistic landscapes - unity in diversity", April 3, 2017, 18:15.
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New publication by Paul Widmer on argument selection and the morphosyntax of the Breton and Brittonic verbal complex
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Stefan Dedio, Paul Widmer to present workshop paper at 23rd International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (Thessaloniki)
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Phonetic variation in contemporary Spanish
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An article with the title "How Society Shapes Language: Personal Pronouns in the Greater Burma Zone" by André Müller and Rachel Weymuth has recently been published in "Asiatische Studien - Éudes Asiatiques" (Volume 71, Issue 1).
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Balthasar Bickel to give keynote at Conference on Phylogenetics Methods
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Language and Migration
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Balthasar Bickel in the UZH Magazin
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Rik van Gijn gives inaugural lecture
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PAZ in the Press The Ticinese newspaper “Giornale del Popolo“ published a full paper report in its weekend issue of the 25th of February on the latest publication of the Phonogram Archives
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Mathias Jenny, Volker Dellwo, Paul Widmer to present their research at Mandalay University, Myanmar
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Workshop „Linguistic diversity meets the brain“ to be held at IVS, 15-17 May 2017
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Recursion in language evolution: new paper by IVS team accepted by "Language”
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Stephan Schmid to present at AISV in Pisa
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Upcoming workshop on diachronic morphology (DIAMOR) organized by IVS members
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Michele Loporcaro and Francesco Gardani editors-in-chief of the new Oxford encyclopedia of Romance linguistics
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Sebastian Sauppe published a paper on the timing of turn-taking in dialogue
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SLE accepts all 5 workshops proposed by IVS departent members
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Damián Blasi gives invited talk at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany
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Bickel, Moran and Blasi give talks at workshop on genetics and animal vocal communication / human language
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Damian Blasi held an invited talk at TedLab at MIT
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Damian Blasi held a Plenary talk at the Colloquium "The Grammar of Body Parts" at the PUCP in Lima, Perú
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Damian Blasi held a course on Phylogenetic Methods at the PUCP in Lima, Perú
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New edited volume on switch reference by Rik van Gijn and Jeremy Hammond
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Paper by Damian Blasi et al is reported on in Nature
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New department member: Yingqi Jing
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Camilla Bernardasci and Stephan Schmid publish two new research articles in Studi AISV.
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New publication by the Greater Burma Zone team:
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Phoneticians in Munich
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On 27 October 2016, Camilla Bernardasci presents the new publication of the Phonogram Archives: "Stòri, stralüsc e stremizzi. Registrazioni dialettali nella Svizzera italiana“
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4 new SNSF grants (100% success rate!) at IVS
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Three new department members: Katarzyna Janic, Tim Aufderheide, and Urban Zihlmann
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Balthasar Bickel and Taras Zakharko present new design principle for typological databases at PLM 2016
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Damián Blasi and colleagues published a paper in PNAS: "Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages".
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Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer to give presentations at the conference “Back to the Root - The Structure, Function, and Semantics of the PIE Root” (15. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft) in Vienna.
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Balthasar Bickel to give invited talk at Europen Summer School Workshop on Optional and Differential Case Marking
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Lithuanian-Swiss cooperation programme workshop in Zurich
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New encyclopedia entry on linguistic areas by Rik van Gijn and Pieter Muysken
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Patrick McCormick held a talk on September 5th 2016 at the University of Chiang Mai
Title: Linguistic Evidence for Ethnic Origins: In Search of the “Unfindable”
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Mathias Jenny and Paul Widmer to present papers at ICAAL workshop "Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective" in Chiang Mai.
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IVS members teaching at Porquerolles
Balthasar Bickel and Sabine Stoll are teaching the courses "Cause and effects in the evolution of grammar" and "Language acquisition in a typological perspective" at the European Summer School in Linguistic Typology at Porquerolles, September 4 - 17, 2016.
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Stoll and Bickel contribute to a paper on intentionality in animal communication
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Dieter Studer-Joho and Adrian Leeman dialect experts on sf1 Einstein (25.08.16)
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Big show of the department at SLE 2016
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New paper on the role of prosody and word length in Middle Breton versification by Paul Widmer
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Steve Moran gives talk "Quantitative Analysis of Dogon" at the Mini African Symposium at MPI for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
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Just out! The brand new Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages
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Damián Blasi co-authored a paper on a large cultural, linguistic and ecological database D-Place
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Romance linguists in Rome: Camilla Bernardasci, Stefano Negrinelli, Diego Pescarini, Serena Romagnoli and Stephan Schmid to present at
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Damián Blasi co-authored a paper on a large cultural, linguistic and ecological database D-Place
For more information:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0158391
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Mathias Jenny is teaching a course on "Introduction to linguistics and linguistic fieldwork for anthropologists" at the Mandalay University, Myanmar, August 1-12, 2016.
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Mathias Jenny and Paul Sidwell, in cooperation with the Myanmar Center, Chiang Mai University, are organizing a workshop on "Austroasiatic syntax in areal and diachronic perspective" at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, September 5-7, 2016.
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Balthasar Bickel elected President of the Linguistic Society of Switzerland and member of the Academia Europaea
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Several members of the IVS are giving talks at the 9th Days of Swiss Linguistics in Geneva on June 29 to July 1, 2016
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André Müller to give a talk titled "Mehrsprachigkeit bei den Kachin: wer spricht eigentlich was?"
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Mathias Jenny to give a talk titled "Sprachkontakt in Myanmar - die Rolle peripherer Sprachen und Völker"
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Balthasar Bickel to give a guest lecture in Mainz
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New paper by Karnthida Kerdpol
New paper by Karnthida Kerdpol, Volker Dellwo, and Mathias Jenny published in "Manusya Journal of Humanities": Phonetic sources of sound change: the influence of Thai on nasality in Pwo Karen.
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Damián Blasi to give talk "What quantitative methods can do for the study of cross-linguistic patterns" at U Leipzig on 22 June 2016.
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New paper by Bickel & Zúñiga in press on what a 'word' might be (or not!) in polysynthetic languages.
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Per Baumann defended PhD thesis
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Steven Moran and colleagues to present the paper, "The Open Linguistics Working Group: Developing the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud", at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2016)
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Steven Moran, Robert Schikowski, Danica Pajović, Cazim Hysi and Sabine Stoll to present the paper "The ACQDIV Database: Min(d)ing the Ambient Language" at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2016)
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Stephan Schmid gives lecture on Swiss-German Ethnolects at Université de Fribourg, 20.05.2016
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New publication on Hittite by Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer
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Marie-José Kolly presented a poster on intercoder reliability at r-atics 5
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Mathias Jenny and Patrick McCormick to give talks on "Verb-initial word order in Austroasiatic" and "Mainland Southeast Asia as a linguistic area" at the 26th SEALS conference in Manila
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Introduction to Old Prussian
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Stephan Schmid invited participant in workshop on the Spanish-speaking community in Switzerland at the University of Lausanne
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Sabine Stoll to give a talk on April 20 at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (UZH) on 'Universal principles in language acquisition: a new crosslinguistic approach’.
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Stephan Schmid invited participant at workshop on „Dialect Acquisition and Migration“ in Oslo
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Paul Widmer, Michiel de Vaan and Florian Sommer gave talks at the workshop "Historical and typological approaches to Baltic morphosyntax" in Vilnius.
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Mathias Jenny to give a talk on "Word order in Austroasiatic - what about verb-initial?" at the Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, on April 14, 2016
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Paul Widmer co-authors a talk by Erich Poppe: “Middle Welsh Verbal Nouns and their Constructions. Some Variables for Classification”
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New paper on hierarchical agreement and co-argument sensitivity by Bickel and colleagues
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Patrick McCormick to give three talks in Seattle, WA (USA)
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Manuel Widmer to give a talk at the workshop "The development of argument-marking systems" in Nijmegen, March 31 – April 1
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New publication co-authored by Paul Widmer and Jürg Fleischer (Marburg) on gender, agreement, and agreement morphology in Old and Modern Frisian
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New D-A-CH grant on the Typology of Vowel and Consonant Quantity in Southern German varieties
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Damián Blasi to give talk at Santa Fe Institute
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Manuel Widmer to give a talk at the Symposium on evidentiality, egophoricity and engagement in Stockholm
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Presentation at EVOLANG on animal syntax
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Marie-José Kolly successfully defended her PhD thesis on „The influence of speaker origin and individuality on rhythmic features of non-native speech“
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Mathias Jenny, Patrick McCormick, André Müller and Rachel Weymuth to give talks in panel "Rethinking the relationship between language and identity in Burma and beyond" (convenor: Patrick McCormick)
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Michele Loporcaro and Stephan Schmid invited speakers at workshop on sound change in Salamanca
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New publication by Mathias Jenny and San San Hnin Tun
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Linguistics and Genetics Workshop in March
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Commentary published in the Journal of Language Evolution by Steven Moran
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New paper by Damián Blasi and colleagues in the Journal of Language Evolution
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New article by Jekaterina Mazara & Sabine Stoll
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Two new projects launched: Processing of Ergativity and Morphology in Time and Space
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New department members: Sebastian Sauppe, Michèle Kolačková and Stefan Dedio
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Successful habilitation by Mathias Jenny
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New paper by Stephan Schmid on the borrowability of bound morphemes in language contact
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New paper by Bickel and colleagues on hierarchical alignment
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Stephan Schmid to give presentation on "VOT in L2 German“
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Stephan Schmid to give presentation on „Differenzierungsprozesse im Sprachgebrauch von Jugendlichen in der Deutschschweiz“ at the Colloque VALS-ASLA 2016 in Geneva
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Successful habilitation by Rik Van Gijn
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New publication by Leemann, Kolly, Purves, Britain, and Glaser on using smartphone apps for crowdsourcing language change
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New paper by Balthasar Bickel on large and ancient linguistic areas
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Phonogram Archives on the Radio
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Guest: Penny Brown
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Guests: Shanley Allen and Mary Elliott
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Special issue of Linguistic Discovery and two papers by Rik van Gijn
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Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer are granted funds by the Lietuvos Mokslo Taryba (Lithuanian Research Council)
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Daniel Friedrichs to give invited talks at University of Cambridge and UCL Speech Science Forum
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Damiàn Blasi gave talk in Cambridge at the Department of Phonetics
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Publication by Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly on the effect of dialect imitation on speech rhythm
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New book edited by Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly, Stephan Schmid & Volker Dellwo
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Patrick McCormick to give talk on “A Mon past for a modern nation: writing a minority history into and out of Burma" at St Anthony's College and SOAS
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Mathias Jenny receives ETH Global seed money for cooperation in research and teaching with Mandalay University (Myanmar)
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Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer to give presentations at the 12th International Congress of Balticists in Vilnius
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Balthasar Bickel to give keynote talk at conference on phylogenetic algorithms in linguistics
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27.10.2015 UNESCO World Day of Audiovisual Heritage: "Geschichten aus dem Dorfleben von Diepoldsau"
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Programme workshop Inheritance Hierarchies in Morphology online
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New publication by Rik van Gijn and colleagues on subordination strategies in Tupian languages
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Sandra Auderset and Manuel Widmer at Transalpine Typology Meeting in Lyon
On 8 October 2015, members of the Department will present at the Transalpine Typology Meeting at CRNS in Lyon, France. Sandra Auderset will talk about „The diachronic connection between person and voice", and Manuel Widmer will a give a presentation with the title „Towards a diachronic typology of egophoricity.
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Damián Blasi, Steven Moran, and Sabine Stoll present at CRNS in Lyon
On 20 September 2015, members of the Department present at the research laboratory "Dynamique Du Langage" at CRNS in Lyon, France. Damián Blasi speaks about "Global sound-meaning association biases and the typological bottleneck on language research", and Steven Moran with Sabine Stoll present "The ACQDIV project and database".
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Paul Widmer to give keynote at Arbeitstagung "100 Jahre Entzifferung des Hethitischen"
Paul Widmer to give keynote lecture "Sinn und Methode der Stammbaumrekonstruktion" at the Arbeitstagung "100 Jahre Entzifferung des Hethitischen" organized by the Society of Indo-European Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg on 21 September 2015.
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Florian Sommer to present paper at European Conference of Iranian Studies
Florian Sommer to present a paper on "The Syntax and Semantics of Avestan Compounds" at the Eighth European Conference of Iranian Studies in St. Peterburg.
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New publication on Chintang by Robert Schikowski, Netra P. Paudyal, and Balthasar Bickel
Schikowski, Robert, Netra P. Paudyal & Balthasar Bickel. 2015. Flexible valency in Chintang. In Andrej Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (eds.), Valency Classes in the World's Languages, vol. 1, 669-708. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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IVS at Scientifica
At this year's Scientifica (4-6 September 2015), the IVS is present with a booth entitled VerbildLicht - Sprache sehen, giving insights into visual aspects of language and linguistics: writing systems, dialectology maps, phonetics, and quantitative corpuslinguistics.
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New (temporary) help in our administration
We are happy to announce that we were able to hire Alexandra Herdeg and Melanie Trüssel as administrative assistants, starting immediately.
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Damian Blasi, Manuel Widmer, Piar Karim, and Jekaterina Mažara to join our scientific staff
The department is happy to welcome Damián Blasi, Manuel Widmer, Piar Karim, and Jekaterina Mažara as new members of our scientific staff. Damián Blasi is finishing his PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences with a dissertation on large-scale comparison of language structures with data science methods. Manuel Widmer received his PhD in Historical Linguistics at the University of Bern with a dissertation entitled “A descriptive grammar of Bunan”. Piar Karim received his MA from the University of North Texas is now taking up a PhD project on Burushaski and neighboring languages. Jekaterina Mažara received her MA from the University of Zürich and is now starting her cumulative dissertation on the acquisition of aspect as part of the ACQDIV project.
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5 talks by department members at SLE 2015
There are 5 talks by department members at SLE 2015 in Leiden: Balthasar Bickel, Taras Zakharko, Steven Moran, Robert Schikowski, and Sabine Stoll will present a paper on "Syntactic mixing across generations in an environment of community-wide bilingualism”; Balthasar Bickel, Taras Zakharko together with former department members Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Giorgio Iemmolo on "The distribution of zeros in agreement paradigms: exploring diachronic universals”; Manuel Widmer with Marius Zemp (Kobe) on "From syntactic to epistemic relations: the rise of conjunct/disjunct marking in Bunan”; Manuel Widmer with Marius Zemp (Kobe) and Fernando Zúñiga (Bern) on "Knowledge from a Himalayan perspective: a preliminary typology of conjunct/disjunct oppositions in Tibeto-Burman"; Rik van Gijn on "Clitics and particles in Tupian". Further, Rik van Gijn and Fernando Zúñiga (Bern) are the convenors of the workshop "Clitics: areal and genealogical perspectives".
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Bickel and colleages to give talk on orangutan communication
Simon W. Townsend, Brigitte Spillmann, Carel van Schaik and Balthasar Bickel will present their latest research on vocal communication among orangutans ("Cracking the orangutan code: an alternative form of meaning encoding”) at the 6th European Federation for Primatology Meeting EFP2015, Rome, 25-28 August
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Balthasar Bickel to give plenary at Sino-Tibetan conference
Balthasar Bickel will give a plenary talk on “Kiranti in global perspective” at the 48th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics ICSTLL48, Santa Barbara, California, August 21-23, 2015. In addition, Bickel will present his research on spatial language in Kiranti at an adjacent workshop.
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New paper by Bickel and colleages on how the brain shapes grammar
Together with Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (U Kiel), Kamal Choudhary (IIT Ropar), Matthias Schlesewsky (U Adelaide) and Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (U Adelaide), Balthasar Bickel published a new study in PLOS ONE showing that the way in which the brain processes case constructions leads to systematic biases in how languages evolve over time. More
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10-14 August 2015: Phoneticians in Glasgow
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Workshop on inheritance hierarchies in morphology
The Interessensgemeinschaft Morphologie, a collective of PhD students and post-doctoral researchers based at the University of Zurich are organizing a 2-day workshop on Inheritance hierarchies in morphology in Zurich, on 10-11 November. Find the description and call for papers here (http://www.linguistics-phd.uzh.ch/en/groups/igmorphology/workshop.html)
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André Müller and Rachel Weymuth to give a talk
André Müller and Rachel Weymuth to give talk about "Sprache und Gesellschaft in Myanmar: Pronominalsysteme" on Thurstday the 23 of July at 16:45 at the "Interdisziplinäre Tagung zur Vernetzung der deutschsprachigen Myanmarforschenden 2015".
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Mathias Jenny to give a talk 6th International Conference on Austroasiatic Languages
Mathias Jenny to give a talk on "Syntactic diversity in Austroasiatic languages: where does it come from?" on July 29, 2015, at the 6th International Conference on Austroasiatic Languages in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
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Mathias Jenny to give a talk at International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies
Mathias Jenny to give a talk on "Foreign influence in Burmese" on July 25, 2015, at the International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies "Burma/Myanmar in Transition: Connectivity, Changes and Challenges".
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New paper by Daniel Friedrichs and colleagues
A paper by Daniel Friedrichs, Dieter Maurer and Volker Dellwo entitled 'The phonological function of vowels is maintained at fundamental frequencies up to 880 Hz' was published in the Express Letters section of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
The paper can be found online via the below link:
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New paper on evolutionary trends in agreement system by Balthasar Bickel and colleagues
Balthasar Bickel teamed up with Taras Zakharko and former department members Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Giorgio Iemmolo to publish a new study on evolutionary biases in verb agreement systems worldwide.
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New publication by Rik van Gijn
Rik van Gijn published a Spanish-language grammar sketch of Yurakaré in "Las Lenguas de Bolivia III: Oriente", edited by Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken. For more information, see the link attached below:
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New publication by Rik van Gijn
Rik van Gijn published a short paper about evaluative morphology in Yurakaré in the “Ediburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology", edited by Nicola Grandi and Livia Kortvelyessy. For more information, see the link attached below.
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ACQDIV kickoff workshop a success
The ACQDIV kickoff workshop has successfully passed. It took place at Kappel Abbeyfrom 10 - 13 June 2015 and brought together members of the core team, affiliates, and international collaborators to work on the central research topics of ACQDIV and develop ideas for publications.
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Edisyn VIII co-organized by Florian Sommer and Dieter Studer-Joho
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New publication by Paul Widmer
Paul Widmer published an article “Zu Pelletiers Vorlage des Buhez Sant Gwenole” in: Mélanges en l’honneur de Pierre Yves Lambert (édités par Guillaume Oudaer, Gaël Hily et Herve Le Bihan, Rennes: Tir 2015).
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Two talks in Sweden by Sabine Stoll
Sabine Stoll gave two talks on comparative language acquisition research in Sweden: "Are there universal correlations between pointings and speech acts in language acquisition?" at the University of Stockholmand "Studying language change in big data of a small language: the case of Chintang" at the Workshop on linguistic fieldwork in South Asiaat the University of Uppsala.
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Talk on reusing corpora by Robert Schikowski and Steven Moran
Robert Schikowskiand Steven Morangave a talk on reusing language acquisition corpora at the workshop "How to make data reusable?"(Zurich, 29 May 2015), based on their experiences in ACQDIV.
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New publication by Paul Widmer together with Jürg Fleischer and Elisabeth Rieken
New publication by Paul Widmer together with Jürg Fleischer and Elisabeth Rieken: "Introduction: the diachrony of agreement" in "Agreement from a Diachronic Perspective" [TiLSM 287], ed. by Jürg Fleischer, Elisabeth Rieken and Paul Widmer, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–26.
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Mathias Jenny to give four talks at CRLAO/EHESS
Mathias Jenny is to give four talks as a visiting scholar at the CRLAO/EHESS Paris during June 2015. The topics of the talks are 1. Multiverb predicates in Southeast Asian languages (June 3, 2015) 2. GIVE and GET in the languages of Southeast Asia and beyond (June 10, 2015) 3. Exploring language contact in Myanmar (June 17, 2015) 4. New Situation (NewSit) – an aspectual category in Southeast Asia (June 24, 2015)
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Balthasar Bickel to give guest lecture at U Stockholm
Balthasar Bickel will give a guest lecture on "Case marking, neurophysiology and language evolution” at the University of Stockholm, May 28
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Steven Moran and colleagues publish new online database 'Tsammalex'
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André Müller to give talk at SEALS
André Müller is giving a talk titled "Tonal Minor Syllables in Jinghpaw?" at the 25th SEALS conferencein Chiangmai, Thailand, May 27 - 29, 2015.
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Mathias Jenny to give talk at SEALS
Mathias Jenny is giving a talk on "Emergent incorporation in Burmese as a syntactic phenomenon" at the 25th SEALS conferencein Chiangmai, Thailand, on May 27, 2015.
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Balthasar Bickel to give talk at an interdisciplinary workshop on nativism in Edinburgh
Balthasar Bickel will give a talk on “Language Universals in Evolutionary Perspective” at an international and interdisciplinary workshop “Perspectives on Nativism’, May 21-22, 2015, at the University of Edinburgh
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Interdisciplinary Workshop on Vocal Accomodation
Several members of the department will participate in an interdisciplinary workshop on vocal accomodation, May 19, 2015. Volker Dellwo will present on "The impact of voice identification skills on communication and social interaction” and Balthasar Bickel acts as a discussant.
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Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer to give a talk at the meeting of the Editing Avestan network in Berlin
Institute members Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer will give a talk on the typology of scribal mistakes and its impact on our understanding of Avestan grammar in Berlin May 23.
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New SNF Grant on the Processing of Ergative Structures
Together with Martin Meyer (Psychology, UZH), Balthasar Bickel was awarded a three-year grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation for a project on “Ergativity in comprehension and production: language typology and processing”. The project will collaborate with an international team at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (E. Norcliffe, S. Levinson), the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastián (M. Carreras), the U. of South Australia, Adelaide (I. Bornkessel-Schlesewksy), the U. of Auckland (I. Kirk, Q. Atkinson), and the Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar (K. Choudhary). Project work will begin early 2016.
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New publication by Mathias Jenny: "Syntactic diversity and change in Austroasiatic languages"
New publication by Mathias Jenny: "Syntactic diversity and change in Austroasiatic languages" in Perspectives on Historical Syntax, by Viti, Carlotta (ed.) [SLCS 169], Benjamins, 317-340.
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Steven Moran presenting with Garland McNew "Visualizing WALS (and other) data"
Steven Moran presenting with Garland McNew "Visualizing WALS (and other) data" at the "Workshop on Language Comparison with Linguistic Databases". Thursday April 30. Leipzig, Germany.
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Seven members of the department to give talks at conference on linguistic diversity
At the Diversity Linguistics conference in Leipzig May 1- 3, department members Bickel, Maurer, Moran, Schikowski, Stoll, Weber, and Zakharko are authors and/or co-authors of a total of six talks.
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Research of the ERC Project ACQDIV on Aboriginal TV in Canada
The ERC Project 'ACQDIV: Acquisition processes in maximally diverse languages: min(d)ing the ambient language' will build up the first longitudinal corpus of an Athapaskan language (Dene, Clearwater). This project was featured on National News of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.
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New project awarded by the SNF to Michele Loporcaro and Sabine Stoll
Michele Loporcaro and Sabine Stoll were awarded a grant from the SNF to study 'The morphosyntax of agreement in Jauer: acquisition and contact'. The project, which will build-up large adult and language acquisition corpora will start in 2016.
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Volker Dellwo on SRF "Kulturplatz Schweiz“
Volker Dellwo on SRF "Kulturplatz Schweiz“ (Wednesday 22th of April)
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Bickel to give invited talk at conference on causality in the language sciences
Balthasar Bickel presents an invited paper on "Moving beyond Pāṇini: causal theories in linguistics” at an interdisciplinary conference on “Causality in the Language Sciences” in Leipzig, April 13 - 15, 2015, co-organized by the MPI for for Mathematics in the Sciences, the MPI for Human History, the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology and the MPI for Psycholinguistics.
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New publication by Mathias Jenny
"The far West of Southeast Asia: ‘Give’ and ‘get’ in the languages of Myanmar" in "Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: the State of the Art" edited by Nick Enfield and Bernard Comrie (de Gruyter Mouton, March 2015).
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Conference on Indo-European linguistics in Erlangen co-organized by Florian Sommer
On March 26–27, 2015 the Institute of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg will be hosting the First Indo-European Research Colloquium. The conference is organized by Thomas Steer and institute member Florian Sommer. For more information and the program see the link attached below:
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Mathias Jenny is to give a talk as invited speaker at the "Seminar on Language and Dialect Continuum in Myanmar"
Mathias Jenny is to give a talk as invited speaker at the "Seminar on Language and Dialect Continuum in Myanmar" held in Yangon, Myanmar, on March 25 and 26, 2015. The title of the talk is "2000 years of history - the Mon language in Thailand and Myanmar".
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Dagmar Jung and Steve Moran will present a talk on "Documenting typological diversity for real: the need of language acquisition studies"
Dagmar Jung, Steve Moran and Sabine Stoll will present a talk on "Documenting typological diversity for real: the need of language acquisition studies" at the Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores, UNAM, at Morelia campus Escuala Nacional de Estudios Superiores, UNAM, Mexico on March 19th. At the "First Latin-American Summer school on Language Documentation and Linguistic typology" from March 23 to 28, Dagmar Jung will teach a class on language documentation and documentation of variation in endangered languages, and Steve Moran will teach a class on Language documentation methods and tools.
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Sprachgeschichte, in Schellack gepresst
Im Unijournal (S. 11) wurde ein Artikel über die Schätze des Phonogrammarchivs publiziert.
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ZüKL-Podcast on speech rhythm with Stephan Schmid
For the ZüKL-Podcast on speech rhythm with Stephan Schmid follow the link attached below.
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New paper by Stoll and colleagues on syntactic mixing
A paper by Sabine Stoll, Taras Zakharko, Steven Moran, Robert Schikowski and Balthasar Bickel with the title: "Syntactic mixing across generations in an environment of community-wide bilingualism" was published in Frontiers in Psychology, 6:82
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New paper by Volker Dellwo and colleagues
A paper by Volker Dellwo, Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly with the title "Rhythmic variability between speakers: Articulatory, prosodic and lexical factors" got accepted by the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and will be published soon.
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New paper co-authored by Volker Dellwo
A paper by Lea Hagmann and Volker Dellwo with the title "Listeners may rely on intonation to distinguish languages of different rhythm classes" was published in Loquens
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New paper by Volker Dellwo and colleagues
A paper by Volker Dellwo, Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly with the title "The recognition of read and spontaneous speech in local vernacular: the case of Zurich German." was published in the Journal of Phonetics (48; p. 13-28).
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Volker Dellwo will give a talk on "Can we identify speakers based on their rhythm?"
Volker Dellwo will give a talk on "Can we identify speakers based on their rhythm?" at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, on January 30, 2015.
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Mathias Jenny is to give a talk on "Structural divergence in Burmese varieties"
Mathias Jenny is to give a talk on "Structural divergence in Burmese varieties" at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, on January 30, 2015.
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Stephan Schmid and Camilla Bernardasci to present at AISV 2015
Stephan Schmid and Camilla Bernardasci are to present their work at AISV 2015: XI Convegno Nazionale dell'Associazione Italiana di Scienze della Voce, Bologna, 28-30 January 2015. Talk: - Sarah Wachter, Lorenzo Filipponio, Stephan Schmid: Le ostruenti sonore dell'italiano nella pronuncia di apprendenti svizzero-tedeschi. Posters: - Camilla Bernardasci: Aspetti quantitativi del vocalismo tonico del dialetto di Piandelagotti (MO). - Sonia Cazzorla, Lorenzo Filipponio, Stephan Schmid: Le vocali di Bari: dialetto e italiano regionale a confronto.
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'Voice Äpp' by the UZH Phonetics Lab launched
The free of charge iPhone and Android App by the members of the UZH Phonetics Lab was launched on 5 January, 2015. Please go to www.voiceapp.chfor further information.
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New paper co-authored by Paul Widmer on syntactic ambiguity in Middle Welsh
Together with Axel Harlos and Erich Poppe, Paul Widmer pblished a corpus-based study on how syntactic ambiguity is prevented and how morphological features interact with two referential properties in order to successfully identify grammatical relations in Middle Welsh (Indogermanische Forschungen 119, 125–148)
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New paper co-authored by Rik van Gijn on approaches to linguistic areas
Together with Pieter Muysken, Harald Hammarström, Joshua Birchall, Olga Krasnoukhova, and Neele Müller, Rik van Gijn published a paper that evaluates a proposal for a linguistic area in South America, the Guaporé-Mamoré area, using several approaches to quantifying measures relating to Sprachbund phenomena.
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The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages edited by Mathias Jenny & Paul Sidwell published
The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages edited by Mathias Jenny and Paul Sidwell published. (2.vols) has been published by Brill. The handbook contains, among many others, three chapters by Mathias Jenny (one together with Tobias Weber and Rachel Weymuth, one together with Patrick McCormick).
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New paper by Salvatore Scarlata and Paul Widmer accepted for publication
A new article by Salvatore Scarlata and Paul Widmer entitled “Vedische exozentrische Komposita mit drei Relationen”, dealing with the internal and external semantosyntactic relations of Old Indo-Aryan compounds, will soon be published in Indo-Iranian Journal.
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New paper challeinging the universality of referential hierarchies by Balthasar Bickel and colleagues
Balthasar Bickel, Taras Zakharko and former department member Alena Witzlack-Makarevich published a chapter entitled “Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on case alignment” in the volume “Scales and Hierarchies”, edited by Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Andrej L. Malchukov and Marc Richards (Berlin, De Gruyter Mouton)
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New articles by Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer published
The proceedings of the annual meeting of the Society for Indo-European Studies at Erlangen 2011, now published at Reichert Verlag, feature two articles by department members Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer. Paul Widmer co-authored a paper entitled “Kongruiert alles? Zu den Kongruenzmustern des Pronominaladjektivs der Bedeutung ‘all, ganz, jeder’ im Griechischen und Hethitischen” (together with Elisabeth Rieken). Florian Sommer wrote on the etymology of the Avestan root noun viš.
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Dr. Dr. Ilya S. Yakubovich to visit the Indo-European Studies
Dr. Dr. Ilya S. Yakubovich (Moscow State University/ University of Marburg) is giving the following lectures: Wednesday, 10 December 2014 at 10:15 at RAG-1-104: Deciphering the Anatolian hieroglyphic inscriptions: Discoveries of the year 2014. Wednesday, 10 December 2014 at 14:00 at RAG-1-104: Lambdacism in Eastern Middle Iranian and Early New Persian. (Co-authored by Pavel Lurje).
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Balthasar Bickel and Sabine Stoll to visit the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Balthasar Bickel and Sabine Stoll to visit the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, November 25-26.
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Sabine Stoll to give guest lecture at MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Sabine Stoll will give an invited talk at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen on Tuesday, 25 November. The talk is entitled: The quest for universal acquisition principles in maximally diverse languages: a new crosslinguistic research program.
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New paper on reduplication in Yurakaré by Rik van Gijn
Rik van Gijn published a paper entitled "Reduplication in Yurakaré" in the book Word formation in South American languages edited by Swintha Danielsen, Katja Hannss, and Fernando Zúñiga. For more information, see:
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New paper co-authored by Florian Sommer
Florian Sommer and Magnus Breder Birkenes published a paper on “The agreement of collective nouns in the history of Ancient Greek and German” in the volume “Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface” (TiLSM 278), edited by Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jäger and Doris Penka.
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New chapter on complexity by Steven Moran and Damián Blasi
Steven Moran and Damián Blasi contributed a chapter on “Cross-linguistic comparison of complexity measures in phonological systems” to the book Measuring Grammatical Complexity, edited by Frederick J. Newmeyer and Laurel Preston.
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Jeffrey Heath visiting
Prof. Jeffrey Heath (University of Michigan) is visiting our department from November 12 - December 6. On Friday 14.11 he will present "Issues in Dogon tonosyntax" at the department research colloquium.
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New book on phonological typology
The volume „Syllable and Word languages“ (ed. by J. Caro Reina and R. Szczepaniak, de Gruyter 2014) contains a chapter by Stephan Schmid on „Syllable typology and the rhythm class hypothesis: Evidence from Italo- Romance dialects“.
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CfP workshop co-organized by Rik van Gijn
Following the success of the workshop "The diachronic stability of complex verbal morphology" during the SLE conference in Poznan earlier this year, Rik van Gijn and Fernando Zúñiga have published a call for papers for a follow-up workshop for the next SLE meeting in Leiden, entitled: "Clitics: areal and genealogical perspectives".
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New publication co-authored by Rik van Gijn
Rik van Gijn published a paper together with Fernando Zúñiga entitled "Word and the americanist perspective. The paper forms the introduction to a special issue of the journal Morphology about wordhood in the Americas, edited by Rik van Gijn and Fernando Zúñiga. See the link attached below for the online versions of the papers.
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Mathias Jenny, Patrick McCormick & André Müller will give a talk on "Tracing Patterns of Contact and Movement in the Greater Burma Zone"
Mathias Jenny, Patrick McCormick and André Müller will give a talk on "Tracing Patterns of Contact and Movement in the Greater Burma Zone" at the workshop "GRAMMATICAL HYBRIDIZATION AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS” at the MPI in Leipzig on October 17, 2014.
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Sabine Stoll to present her research at SNF Tour de Suisse
Sabine Stoll will present her work at a meeting with an SNF delegation visting the University of Zurich as part of their annual "Tour de Suisse" (14.10.2014). For this visit one researcher of the University of Zurich was selected to showcase cutting-edge research.
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Research of Sabine Stoll on comparative language acquisition featured in the UZH magazine
The current magazine of the University of Zurich contains an article about the research on comparative language acquisition research conducted in the Psycholinguistics Laboratory lead by Sabine Stoll.
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New publication by Rik van Gijn in Morphology
Rik van Gijn published a paper entitled “Word accent and mapping rules in Yurakaré”. The paper is part of a special issue of Morphology co-edited by Rik van Gijn and Fernando Zúñiga.
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New paper on the areal development of antipassives as first person object markers in the Himalays accepted for publication
Balthasar Bickel teamed up with social anthropologist Martin Gaenszle (U Vienna) and wrote an article on "First person objects, antipassives, and the political history of the Southern Kirant” that was accepted for publication in the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics.
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New paper on areas and universals by Balthasar Bickel accepted for publication
A paper entitled “Areas and Universals” by Balthasar Bickel was accepted for publication in the Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics edited by Raymond Hickey.
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New handbook chapter on language universals by Balthasar Bickel
Balthasar Bickel contributed a chapter on “linguistic diversity and universals” to the new Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Nick Enfield, Paul Kockelman and Jack Sidnell.
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PHOIBLE by Steven Moran et al. released
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Department members to give talks at the IDG conference in Paris
Department members Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer will give talks at this year's annual meeting of the Society for Indo-European Studies (IDG, Indogermanische Gesellschaft). The conference is entitled “Adjectifs verbaux et participes dans les langues indo-européennes” and will take place in Paris, September 24–26. The titles of their talks will be “Partizipien und Partizipanten im Tocharischen” and “Partizipien und Partizipanten im Jungavestischen” respectively.
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Workshop on "Partitivity in Romance and beyond" organised by Giorgio Iemmolo funded by SNF
"The SNF funded an International Exploratory Workshop "Partitivity in Romance and Beyond", organised by Giorgio Iemmolo and Elisabeth Stark (Dept. of Romance Studies). The workshop will take place at the University of Zurich on 11-13 December!
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Department members give talks at the SLE conference in Poznań
At this year's meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), Sep 11-14, Rik Van Gijn co-organizes (with Fernando Zúñiga) a workshop on “the diachronic stability of complex verbal morphology” and gives a talk on “(Poly-)synthetic verb morphology in the Guaporé-Mamoré: a contact feature?” Balthasar Bickel is co-author of a talk on “Noun to verb ratio and word order” (delivered by former department member Alena Witzlack-Makarevich).
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ACQDIV takes off
The ERC project "Acquisition of linguistic diversity" (ACQDIV) led by Sabine Stoll started on 1 September 2014. This 5-year project will investigate why and how children can learn any of the languages of the world in spite of their extreme diversity, based on data from large corpora.
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Giorgio Iemmolo at SWL6 in Pavia, Italy
Giorgio Iemmolo will give a talk at the Conference "Syntax of the World's Languages 6", to be held at the University of Pavia, Italy, 8-10 September 2014. The title of his talk is "Subject agreement suspension in main and relative clauses: is it really a unified phenomenon?".
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Sabine Stoll appointed professor; starts ERC project
Sabine Stoll was appointed professor as of Sep 1 and starts her ERC consolidator project ACQDIV (“Acquistion processes in maximally diverse languages: Min(d)ing the ambient language”).
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Elena Lieven is visiting the Psycholinguistics Laboratory
Prof. Elena Lieven (University of Manchester) is visiting the Psycholinguistics Laboratory, August 26-28
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New publication: "Transitivity and affectedness in Mon" written by Dr. Mathias Jenny
JENNY, Mathias. 2014. Transitivity and affectedness in Mon. Mon-Khmer Studies 43.1: 57-71 (ICAAL5 special issue)
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The paper "Speaker-individuality in Fujisaki model f0 features: implications for forensic voice comparison" was accepted by the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law
The paper "Speaker-individuality in Fujisaki model f0 features: implications for forensic voice comparison" which was written by Adrian Leemann, Hansjörg Mixdorff, Maria O'Reilly, Marie-José Kolly, Volker Dellwo was accepted by the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law.
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Newar course
From 1 - 13 September 2014, an intensive course in Newar will take place at the Department of Comparative Linguistics. Please see the link below for details.
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The paper "The influence of speaking rate on Fujisaki model parameters" was accepted by the EURASIP Journal
The paper "The influence of speaking rate on Fujisaki model parameters" written by H. Mixdorff, A. Leemann, V. Dellwo was accepted by the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing.
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Emily Bender visiting
Prof. Emily M. Bender (University of Washington) is visiting our department July 10-11. She will give an informal talk on her and her colleagues' work on Chintang on Thursday July 10, 15.00 h, in the seminar room of the department at Plattenstrasse 54.
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Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer will give a talk at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main
Paul Widmer and Florian Sommer will give a talk at a meeting of the network "Editing the Avesta" at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main on July 4, 2014.
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Mathias Jenny to give plenary talk on Myanmar and Thailand
Mathias Jenny is to give a plenary talk on "Language diversity and endangerment in Thailand and Myanmar" at the The 3rd International Conference ‘Language, Society, and Culture in Asian Contexts’ (LSCAC 2014) at Mahasarakham University, Thailand, on July 11, 2014.
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Matilde Vida Castro is visiting the Phonetics Laboratory
Matilde Vida Castro (University of Málaga, Spain) is visiting the Phonetics Laboratory (1-3 July). She will give a talk on Acoustic characteristics of preconsonantal [-s] in a southern Spanish variety in the "Journal Club“ (Tuesday 12:00).
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Johanna Nichols visiting
Johanna Nichols (UC Berkeley) is visiting our institute 18 - 30 June.
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New publication on language evolution
Together with Katie Collier, Carel van Schaik, Marta Manser and Simon Townsend, Balthasar Bickel published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, entitled "Language evolution: syntax before phonology?". This work results from an interdisciplinary project in the URPP Evolution in Action.
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8th Days of Swiss Linguistics at UZH
The 8th Days of Swiss Linguistics are taking place at the University of Zurich 19 - 21 June 2014. For more information please refer to the official homepage.
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Paul Sidwell visiting
Paul Sidwell (ANU, Canberra) is visiting our institute 1 - 18 June.
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Balthasar Bickel to give talk at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Balthasar Bickel will give an invited lecture on "Rethinking Universals of Language” at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on May 20.
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Department of Comparative Linguistics to celebrate its foundation
You are warmly invited to participate at the foundation ceremony of the Department of Comparative Linguistics on 28 May 2014. Details and registration forms are attached below. Registration is open until 21 May 2014. General information (only in German) Registration form in German Registration form in English
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Volker Dellwo and Stephan Schmid at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid)
As part of the Master course in „Estudios fónicos“, Volker Dellwo will teach the module ‚Parámetros temporales en la comparación judicial de voces’ (May 5-6), while Stephan Schmid will teach the module ‚Fonética contrastiva’ (May 8-9).
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Balthasar Bickel invited speaker at a conference on “Linguistic Microareas in South Asia”
Balthasar Bickel will present recent research on “Impersonal patients and the political history of the Southern Kirant microarea”. The conference takes place in Uppsala, Sweden, May 5-6.
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Stephan Schmid gives talk in Spain
Stephan Schmid has been invited to give a lecture on „Formas de contacto entre el español y el italiano: hibridación lingüística y transferibilidad de morfemas ligados“ at the University of Málaga, 23 April 2014.
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Sabine Stoll’s ERC project featured in the UZH News
Please follow the link below, to find the article.
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Giorgio Iemmolo invited speaker at the Conference "The diachronic typology of differential case marking"
Giorgio Iemmolo has been invited to give a talk at the Conference "The diachronic typology of differential case marking", to be held at the University of Konstanz, 5-6 April 2014. The title of his talk is "From topic marker to object marker: what polysemy can tell us about the diachrony of differential object marking"
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Visit by Noun-To-Verb-Ratio (NTVR) project team
Project members Brigitte Pakendorf (CNRS Lyon), Frank Seifart (MPI EVA Leipzig), Jan Strunck (MPI EVA Leipzig) and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (U Kiel) are visiting our department from March 31 to April 4.
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New book on South American languages with three papers by Rik van Gijn
"The native languages of South America: origins, development, typology", edited by Loretta O'Connor and Pieter Muysken, covers a broad range of topics related to the history and structure of South American languages. It contains two papers by Rik van Gijn, one on a transition zone between the Andes and the Amazon, and the other about nominalization as a subordination strategy in South American languages, as well as a concluding chapter co-written by Rik van Gijn together with all of the contributors. For more information, see link below:
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Special issue of 'Linguistics' edited by Giorgio Iemmolo
Giorgio Iemmolo, together with Gerson Klumpp, edited a special issue of Linguistics on "Differential Object Marking: theoretical and empirical issues", which includes a paper by Giorgio on DOM in Chinese (co-authored with G. Arcodia), as well as an introduction coauthored by Giorgio and Gerson. For more information see link below:
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Diana Schackow defended PhD thesis
Diana Schackow successfully defended her PhD thesis on Aspects of Yakkha Grammar on February 25, 2014. Congratulations!
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Mark Aronoff visiting our institute
Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University, NY) is visiting our institute as visiting researcher March 17-21.
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Harald Hammerström visiting our institute
Harald Hammerström (MPI for Psycholingiustics, Nijmegen) is visiting our institute as guest researcher March 18-19.
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Robert Forkel visiting our institute
Robert Forkel (MPI-EVA, Leipzig) is visiting our institute as guest researcher March 18-19.
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New book co-edited by Rik van Gijn
Together with Jeremy Hammond, Dejan Matić, Saskia van Putten and Ana Vilacy Galucio, Rik van Gijn edited a new volume on information structure and reference tracking in complex sentences, which includes a paper by Rik as well as an introduction to the topic coauthored by Rik, together with Dejan Matić and Robert Van Valin Jr. For more information, see link below.
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New publication by Leemann, Kolly, Werlen, Britain and Studer-Joho
The following article has been accepted for publication by Language Variation and Change: Leemann, A., M.-J. Kolly, I. Werlen, D. Britain, D. Studer-Joho (accepted). The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German.
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Balthasar Bickel to give plenary talk
Balthasar Bickel to give plenary talk at this year's conference of the German Linguistics Society, Marburg, Germany, March 5. Bickel will also give a keynote talk in a workshop at the same conference.
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Article by Adrian Leemann, Volker Dellwo and Marie-José Kolly to be published in Forensic Science International
The following paper has been accepted for publication by the journal Forensic Science International: Leemann, Adrian, Volker Dellwo, Marie-José Kolly (accepted). Speaker specificity in the time domain: implications for forensic voice comparison. Forensic Science International.
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Paper by Leemann, Dellwo, Kolly and Schmid at Speech Prosody 2014
The following paper by Adrian Leemann, Volker Dellwo, Marie-José Kolly and Stephan Schmid has been accepted by the Speech Prosody 2014 conference in Dublin: Leemann, Adrian, Volker Dellwo, Marie-José Kolly, Stephan Schmid (accepted). Disentangling sources of rhythmic variability between dialects. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014.
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Paper by Leemann, Kolly and Dellwo at Speech Prosody 2014
A paper by Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly and Volker Dellwo has been accepted for presentation at Speech Prosody 2014 in Dublin: Leemann, Adrian, Marie-José Kolly, Volker Dellwo (accepted). New ways of collecting data: crowdsourcing speaking rate with the iOS app 'Dialäkt Äpp'. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014.
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Talks by members of the department in New Delhi, India, February 17-19
At an explorative workshop organised jointly by UZH and JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Balthasar Bickel, Mathias Jenny, Sabine Stoll and Paul Widmer will present recent work on possessive structures. The workshop is part of university-wide plans for fostering cooperation between JNU and UZH.
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New paper by Roland Litscher published
Roland Litscher's paper 'Voraussetzungen für ein feminines Genus und Implikationen für das Kategoriensystem des frühindogermanischen Nomens' is now published in Sergio Neri and Roland Schuhmann (eds.): Studies on the Collective and Feminine in Indo-European from a Diachronic and Typological Perspective, Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp.137–165.
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New paper by Marie-José Kolly and Volker Dellwo published
A paper by Kolly and Dellwo on foreign accent recognition based on time domain cues has been published in the Journal of Phonetics.
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New paper by Balthasar Bickel and colleagues accepted for publication
New paper by Balthasar Bickel and colleagues on semantic role clustering accepted for publication in Studies in Language.
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Paul Widmer named professor of Comparative Indo-European Studies
PD Dr. Paul Widmer (currently at the Philipps-University Marburg) has been appointed associate professor of Comparative Indo-European Studies at the University of Zurich.
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Sabine Stoll receives prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant
Sabine Stoll has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant. There were 3673 submissions, only 312 of which were funded.
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Steven Moran giving talk at Dynamique du language (CRNS)
Steven Moran speaks about "Qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of Dogon languages" at the Seminar Series at the Dynamique du language lab (CRNS) in Lyon, France, January 24, 2014.
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Article by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel published
The article "Capturing diversity in language acquisition research" has been published in Typological Studies in Language 104:
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Article by Sabine Stoll and Elena Lieven published
The article "Studying language acquisition cross-linguistically" by Sabine Stoll and Elena Lieven has been published in: Winskel, H., Pradakannaya, P. (eds.) South and Southeast Asian psycholinguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
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Article by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel published
The article "The acquisition of ergative case in Chintang" by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel has been published in "The acquisition of ergative", co-edited by Edith Bavin and Sabine Stoll.
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Article by Sabine Stoll and Edith Bavin published
The introductory article "The acquisition of ergativity " by Sabine Stoll and Edith Bavin has been published in the correspondent book "The acquisition of ergativity" co-edited by Bavin and Stoll.
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Article by Mathias Jenny and San San Hnin Tun published
A new article by Mathias Jenny and San San Hnin Tun titled "Differential subject marking without ergativity. The case of colloquial Burmese" has been published in Studies in Language 37:4.
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New book co-edited by Sabine Stoll on acquisition of ergativity
New book co-edited by Sabine Stoll together with Edith Bavin (LaTrobe U., Melbourne) on the acquisition of ergativity, published by Benjamins. Includes two articles by Sabine Stoll: (1) The acquisition of ergativity (together with E. Bavin). (2) The acquisition of ergative case in Chintang (together with B. Bickel).
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New book co-edited by Balthasar Bickel released
Together with Lenore Grenoble (U Chicago), Dave Peterson (Dartmouth) and Alan Timberlake (Columbia U), Balthasar Bickel edited a volume on «Language Typology and Historical Contingency» as a festschrift for Johanna Nichols. The book appeared in the Typological Studies of Language series at Benjamins:
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Steven Moran giving talk at University of Stockholm
Steven Moran speaks about "Qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of Dogon languages" at the Colloquium Seminar in the Linguistic Department at the University of Stockholm, December 12th, 2013.
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Article by Giorgio Iemmolo in STUF – Language Typology and Universals
The article 'Symmetric and asymmetric alternations in direct object encoding' by Giorgio Iemmolo has been published in 'STUF – Language Typology and Universals', volume 66, 4, December 2013, pp. 378-403.
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Prof. Dr. Michele Loporcaro affiliated to General Linguistics
Prof. Dr. Michele Loporcaro has been appointed affiliated faculty member at the Department of General Linguistics. Professor Loporcaro's main affiliation remains with the Department of Romance languages, but he is now professor of Romance and General Linguistics.
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New book co-edited by Sabine Stoll on acquisition of ergativity
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Kaius Sinnemäki visiting our institute
Kaius Sinnemäki (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki) is visiting our institute as guest researcher November 25-29, 2013.
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Paul Sidwell visiting our institute
Paul Sidwell (ANU, Canberra) is visiting our institute as guest researcher November 21-29, 2013.
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Inter-university meeting on the Akan language
On Friday, November 29, and Saturday, November 30, 2013, the Department of General Linguistics will host an inter-university meeting at which scholars working on the Akan language will discuss future cooperation. Prof. Dr. Dorothee Beermann (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Prof. Dr. Thomas Bearth (University of Zurich) will present the current state of various Akan language corpora and other electronic resources.
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Giorgio Iemmolo to give invited talk at the University of Leuven
Giorgio Iemmolo will be delivering a talk on "Commonalities and peculiarities of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Romance from a typological perspective" at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Leuven on Friday, 29 November 2013, at 15.00.
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Robert Schikowski and Balthasar Bickel publish valency dictionary of Chintang
Together with Netra Paudyal from the Unversity of Kiel, Robert Schikowski and Balthasar Bickel contributed an analysis of Chintang to the Valency Patterns Leipzig Online Database (ValPal). The data is available at the link below:
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Philippe Maurer co-publishes Atlas of Pidigin and Creole Languages
Together with colleagues at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Giessen, Philippe Maurer published the Atlas of Pidigin and Creole Languages. The Online Version is available at APiCS-online.info
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Sabine Stoll to give talk at Freiburg workshop on language documentation
Sabine Stoll is giving a talk entitled "Annotating and analyzing a longitudinal corpus to study the acquisition of an endangered language" at the Freiburg workshop on language documentation taking place in Freiburg i.Br. (Germany), November 22-23, 2013.
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Sabine Stoll to give guest lecture at University of Basel
Sabine stoll is giving a guest lecture titled "Kulturspezifische Interaktionsmuster im Spracherwerb" in the international doctoral program "Hermann Paul School of Linguistics" of the universities Basel and Freiburg i.Br. The talk takes place on Tuesday, November 5, 2013, at 14.15 h. For more details follow the link below:
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A new linguistic institute
The UZH Board agreed to the creation of a new Department of Comparative Linguistics. The new department will include the former departments of general linguistics and Indo-European linguistics as well as the Phonetics Lab, the Psycholinguistics Lab and the Phonogram Archive. The new department will start operations on January 1, 2014.
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CfP workshop co-organized by Rik van Gijn on morphological complexity
The call for papers for a workshop on the diachronic stability of verbal morphological complexity, organized by Rik van Gijn and Fernando Zúñiga, has been posted on LinguistList. It is intended as a workshop to be held within the context of the 47th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Poznań (11-14 September). For more information, see link below:
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Tanja Samardžić and Hanna Ruch moving in
Tanja Samardžić and Hanna Ruch move into their offices in the Institute of General Linguistics. Tanja Samardžić is the director of the newly established KorpusLab, a corpuslinguistic laboratory that is part of the University Research Priority Program (URPP) Language and Space (UFSP Sprache und Raum). Hanna Ruch begins her work as a PostDoc researcher in the URPP.
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Mathias Jenny receives a 3-year project grant from SNF
Mathias Jenny receives a 3-year project grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the project entitled “The greater Burma Zone - a transitional zone of languages and peoples”.
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Article by Bickel, Iemmolo, Zakharko, and Witzlack-Makarevich published
The article "Patterns of alignment in verb agreement" by Balthasar Bickel, Giorgio Iemmolo, Taras Zakharko, and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich has just been published by de Gruyter in the book "Languages Across Boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska", edited by Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath.
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Article by Steven Moran published
The article "Investigating the relatedness of the endangered Dogon languages" by Steven Moran and Jelena Prokić has been published in Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford Journals).
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Peter Trudgill visiting
Peter Trudgill (University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway) is guest at our institute teaching a course on 'Sociolinguistic Typology' as part of the Doctoral Program Linguistics, September 25/26 and October 2/3, 2013.
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Rik van Gijn to give a talk at Meronym conference Mexico City
Rik van Gijn will give a talk on "Meronyms in Yurakaré" at the conference "Meronyms across languages: lexicalization, semantics, morphosyntax" held in Mexico City, 27-28 September, organized by Alejandra Capistrán, Samuel Herrera, Carolyn O'Meara, and Jürgen Bohnemeyer.
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Giorgio Iemmolo to give a talk at EACL8 in Paris
Giorgio Iemmolo will give a talk on "More on the origin of direct object markers in Sinitic" co-authored with Giorgio Francesco Arcodia (University of Milano-Bicocca) at the next 8th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL8), to be held at INALCO, 26-28 September 2013 in Paris (France).
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Balthasar Bickel to give talk at 'The Cognitive Revolution 60 Years On'
Balthasar Bickel is giving a talk titled "Beyond absolute universals" at the conference "The Cognitive Revolution 60 Years On" organized by the British Academy. The event is taking place in London September 26-27, 2013.
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Two talks by members of the Department of General Linguistics at the 46th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Split
Two talks by members of the Department of General Linguistics will be held at the 46th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea taking place in Split, Croatia, 18-21 September 2013: Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, and Taras Zakharko: "Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on agent case marking". Rik van Gijn: "Switch reference in the upper Amazon and Andean regions".
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Giorgio Iemmolo and Rik van Gijn co-convenors of workshops at the 46th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Split
Giorgio Iemmolo and Rik van Gijn will be co-convenors of two thematic workshops at the next SLE Annual Meeting to be held in Split, 18-21 September 2013. Giorgio has organised a workshop on the "Typology of Adposition and Case Marker Borrowing", in collaboration with Eitan Grossman (Jerusalem), Petros Karatsareas (Cambridge/Cyprus), and Stéphane Polis (Liège). Rik, together with Jeremy Hammond (MPI Nijmegen), Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and MPI Nijmegen), has organised a workshop on "Switch-reference: state of the art and where to go from here?"
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Steven Moran to present two papers at 2nd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics in Pisa
Steven Moran has two papers accepted for publication and presentation at the 2nd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Representing and linking lexicons, terminologies and other language data. Collocated with GL2013 (Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon), the workshop takes place September 23 2013 in Pisa, Italy. Paper 1: "Linguistic Resources Enhanced with Geospatial Information" by Richard Littauer, Boris Villazon-Terrazas and Steven Moran. Paper 2: "Lemon-aid: using Lemon to aid quantitative historical linguistic analysis" by Steven Moran and Martin Brümmer.
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Sabine Stoll to give talk at conference 'From Hand to Mouth' in Zürich
Sabine Stoll is giving a talk titled "The role of complexity in the acquisition of morphology" at the international conference "From Hand to Mouth: A dialogue between spoken and signed language research" taking place in Zürich, September 5-7 2013.
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Balthasar Bickel to give talk at conference 'From Hand to Mouth' in Zürich
Balthasar Bickel is giving a talk titled "Linguistic diversity and language ecologies" at the international conference "From Hand to Mouth: A dialogue between spoken and signed language research" taking place in Zürich, September 5-7 2013.
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Mathias Jenny to give talk at ICAAL 5 in Canberra
Mathias Jenny will give a talk on 'Transitive directionals in Mon - form, function, and implications for linguistic typology' at the 5th International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics (ICAAL 5) on September 5, 2013, at the ANU, Canberra.'
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Steven Moran at the 44th Poznań Linguistic Meeting
Steven Moran delivers a talk titled "Cross-linguistic comparison of complexity measures in phonological systems" together with Damian Blasi at the 'Debate on linguistic complexity' at the 44th Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM2013) on 29 August-1 September 2013.
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Steven Moran to give talk at CALL in Leiden
Steven Moran is giving a talk titled "Application and evaluation of quantitative comparative methods on Dogon" at the Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (CALL) in Leiden, Netherlands on 26-28 August.
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Zwei studentische Assistenzen gesucht
Das Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft sucht zwei studentische Assistenzen: (a) 10% studentische Assistenz: Die Aufgaben umfassen Hilfsarbeiten in verschiedenen Forschungsprojekten (Annotationen, Analysen, Recherchen), in der Lehre, der Bibliothek oder in der Seminarverwaltung, je nach Bedarf. Interessierte melden sich bitte bis 1. September 2013 per e-Mail bei Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel. (b) 20% studentische Assistenz: Mithilfe bei Content-Management und Korrektur einer Datenbank zu phonologischer Typologie. Vorkenntnisse in Phonetik und/oder Phonologie sind von Vorteil. Interessierte melden sich bis 30. September 2013 per e-Mail and Dr. Steven Moran.
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Balthasar Bickel to give talk at Scientifica 2013
Balthasar Bickel is giving a talk at the Scientifica 2013 entitled 'Das sprachliche Erbe der Menschheit in Gefahr'. The talk takes place on Sunday, September 1, at 3 - 3.45 pm, in room HG E 3 (ETH).
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General Linguistics at Scientifica 2013
Scientifica 2013, the 'Zürich Days of Science', take place at ETH and UZH on August 31 and September 1. In collaboration with the Phonetics Lab, the Phonogram Archive, as well as the Lia Rumantscha, the Department of General Linguistics is present with their exhibition 'Sprachensterben – Risiken und Nebenwirkungen' ('Language death - risks and side effects'). Follow the link for more information:
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Steven Moran at ACL 2013 in Sofia
Together with Johann-Mattis List, Steven Moran presents "An open source toolkit for quantitative historical linguistics" at the Association for Computational Linguistic in Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9.
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Talks by members of the Department of General Linguistics at ALT10 in Leipzig
At the 10th biennal Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT10) - taking place in Leipzig August 15-18, 2013 - there will be a number of talks by members of the Department of General Linguistics: Iemmolo, Giorgio and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich: "When is there agreement? Typologizing restrictions on agreement". Grossman, Eitan and Giorgio Iemmolo: "A rare case of Differential Marking on S/A: the case of Coptic". Jenny, Mathias: "Transitive directionals in Mon - form, function and implications for linguistic typology". Moran, Steven: "Typology with graphs and matrices". Moran, Steven, Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel: "Estimating diachronic preferences of phonological features cross-linguistically". Weber, Tobias: "Why is ergativity often restricted to certain environments? A look at the diachrony of Differential A Marking". Abstracts can be downloaded from the link below:
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Volker Dellwo, Agnes Kolmer, and Richard Wiese to host workshop at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva
Volker Dellwo, Agnes Kolmer, and Richard Wiese are hosting a workshop at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, July 21-27 2013, entitled "Word stress: dialectal variation and perception".
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Tobias Weber to give talk at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva
Tobias Weber gives a talk at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, July 21-27 2013, entitled "Language-internal variation in crosslinguistic perspective: studying patterns of interacting factors conditioning Differential Agent Marking".
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Sabine Stoll and Chintang Project in UZH News
Sabine Stoll, the Psycholinguistics Lab, and the Chintang project are featured in the UZH News. Follow the link for an online article on the typology of first language acquisition.
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Steven Moran at Language Diversity Congress in Groningen
Steven Moran and Jelena Prokic are giving a talk on Friday July 19 at the Language Diversity Congress in Groningen. Their paper is entitled "Paper title: Diversity of language sources: challenges in digitization, interoperation and analysis". Additionally, Steven Moran and Damian Blasi have a poster "Obstruents and latitude: acoustic adaptation, thermal influence or spurious statistics?" at the same Congress.
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Talk by Mathias Jenny at Chiangmai University
On July 16, 2013, Mathias Jenny will give a talk on "Linguistic fieldwork in Myanmar - new challenges and perspectives" at Chiangmai University, Thailand.
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Steven Moran and Jelena Prokic giving talk at the LIPP symposium on endangered languages
Steven Moran and Jelena Prokic are giving a talk on Thursday July 11 in Munich at the LIPP symposium on endangered languages entitled "Digital technology and endangered Dogon languages".
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New website on distributional typology launched
The Department of General Linguistics announces the launch of a microsite on Distributional Typology. The site collects recent work on probabilistic approaches to linguistic typology done at the department. It serves as a starting point for those who want to learn more about the theoretical and methodological foundations of Distributional Typology or those who want to read up on the latest work on it in Zurich.
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Katharina Haude visiting our institute
Katharina Haude (CNRS, Paris-Villejuif) is visiting our institute as guest researcher July 8 - 12, 2013.
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Mathias Jenny, Volker Dellwo, and Rachel Weymuth on YouTube
Mathias Jenny, Volker Dellwo, and Rachel Weymuth's visit at Mahasarakham University in Thailand (June 11, 2013) is featured on YouTube. Follow the link below.
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Talk by Sabine Stoll at conference "Language Documentation"
Talk by Sabine Stoll at the Conference "Language Documentation: Past – Present – Future" in Hannover, June 5-7, 2013: "Chintang: language acquisition".
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Article by Sabine Stoll in supplement of 'Spektrum der Wissenschaft'
Sabine Stoll contributed an article to the brochure "Bedrohte Sprachen. Warum die Vielfalt stirbt – und wie Forscher kulturelles Wissen vor dem Vergessen retten", a supplement to the newest issue of "Spektrum der Wissenschaft".
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Workshop held by Volker Dellwo, Mathias Jenny, and Rachel Weymuth
Volker Dellwo, Mathias Jenny, and Rachel Weymuth will hold a workshop on "Fieldwork in changing Myanmar - challenges and prospects 2013" at Mahasarakham University in Thailand on June 11, 2013.
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Keynote talk by Balthasar Bickel at conference "Language Documentation"
Keynote talk by Balthasar Bickel at the Conference "Language Documentation: Past – Present – Future" in Hannover, June 5-7, 2013: "Linguistics without elicitation: new horizons emerging from corpora of endangered languages".
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Alena Witzlack-Makarevich receives honourable mention
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich receives honourable mention to her dissertation (2010) "Typological variation in grammatical relations" on occasion of the Joseph Greenberg award for typological dissertation defended between 2009 and 2012, presented by the Association for Linguistic Typology.
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Workshop on "Landscape through the prism of language"
On June 1st, the Departments of General Linguistics and Geography will jointly be hosting an interdisciplinary workshop on "Landscape through the prism of language", funded by the GRC of the University of Zurich. More information can be found in the link below.
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Transalpine Typology Meeting
On May 30 and 31 2013, the Department of General Linguistics will be hosting the third edition of the Transalpine Typology Meeting. More information can be found in the link below.
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Giorgio Iemmolo and Robert Schikowski at CASTL in Tromsø
Giorgio Iemmolo and Robert Schikowski will give a talk on "Differential Object Marking and Differential Object Indexation" at the CASTL of the University of Tromsø, Norway, on May 23-24.
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Taras Zakharko to give talk at ZAS in Berlin
Taras Zakharko is giving a talk entitled "ToolboxSearch: an R package for working with Toolbox Corpora" at the workshop 'Exploring data from language documentation' organized by the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin, May 10-11 2013.
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Three talks by members of the seminar at 23rd SEALS conference in Bankok
At the 23rd SEALS (Southeast Asian Linguistics Society) conference taking place in Bankok/Thailand May 29-31 2013, three members of our seminar will present a paper: - Tobias Weber "Locus of marking on the clause level in Southeast Asia: areal and genealogical patterns" - Voker Dellwo (together with Peggy Mok): "Rhythmic variability in South-East Asian languages: application of a novel method for rhythmic measurements based on syllabic amplitude peak points" - Mathias Jenny: "‘New Situation’ (NSIT) - Southeast Asian languages and aspect theory"
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Plenary talk by Mathias Jenny at the 23rd SEALS conference in Bangkok
Mathias Jenny will give a plenary talk ath the 23rd SEALS (Southeast Asian Linguistics Society) conference taking place in Bankok/Thailand May 29-31 2013. The title of the talk is "New challenges in fieldwork in a changing Southeast Asia - languages of Myanmar".
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Alena Witzlack-Makarevich appointed junior professorship in Kiel
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich has accepted a junior professorship in General Linguistics from the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. She will start her new appointment on May 1 2013.
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Talk by Bill Foley
Bill Foley (University of Sydney) is giving a talk entitled "Direct-inverse systems in Murik-Kopar: role alignment, person hierarchies and paradigm collapse". The talk is part of the 'Projektkolloquium' and will take place on Friday, April 26, at 10:15 am in room KOL-H-309 (University main building).
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Talk by Greville Corbett
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Talk by Katharina Haude
Dr. Katharina Haude (CNRS/SeDyL, Villejuif) is giving a talk entitled "Animacy and inverse voice in Movima: a corpus study". The talk is part of the 'Projektkolloquium' and will take place on Friday, April 19, at 10:15 am in room KOL-H-309 (University main building).
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Balthasar Bickel to give two talks at Charles University in Prague
Balthasar Bickel will give two talks at the Charles University in Prague, April 15-17 2013, entitled (1) Distributional Typology: a probabilistic approach to linguistic universals and areal diffusion and (2) Government vs. agreement in typological perspective.
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Sabine Stoll to give two talks at Charles University in Prague
Sabine Stoll will give two talks at the Charles University in Prague, April 15-17 2013, entitled (1) Comparative language acquisition research: some new methods and (2) Learning argument structure with strong variation: item-specificity and conversational interaction.
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Taras Zakharko at the workshop on "Current Tendencies and Potentials in Language Documentation" in Campinas, Brazil
Taras Zakharko will be teaching the course "Introduction to R and Quantitative Analysis of Language Documentation Data" at the workshop on Current Tendencies and Potentials in Language Documentation. In addition, he will present a talk titled "Corpus-based typology of clause linkage: a language-independent annotation schema of linguistic predication". The workshop will take place at the UNICAMP (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) in Campinas, Brazil, April 2-5, 2013.
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Inventory of linguistic journals now available on the department library's homepage
As of now you can find a summarized inventory of the department's linguistic journals in conjunction with the inventories of the Central Library of Zürich (ZB) and the Electronic Journal Library (EZB) of the University of Zürich in a synopsison the department library's homepage. Journals which are available online have a direct link to the publisher's website.
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Interview with Volker Dellwo published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung interviewed Volker Dellwo on voice imitation and speaker recognition and published an article March 24 2013.
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"Dialäkt Äpp" by Mary-José Kolly and Adrian Leemann released
The iPhone application "Dialäkt Äpp" by Mary-José Kolly and Adrian Leemann was released on Friday, March 22 2013. It can be downloaded for free on iTunes. It has been covered by the media several times already, as for example in 20 Minuten. See also the UZH press release.
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Studentische Assistenz gesucht
Am Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft wird ab sofort bzw. zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt 1 studentische Assistenz (zwischen 20-40%, ggf auch in unterschiedlichem Umfang in Semester und in den Semesterferien) angeboten. Die Aufgabe besteht in der morphologischen und syntaktischen Glossierung bzw. Annotation unseres Korpus des Chintang (Sinotibetisch: Kiranti; Nepal). Voraussetzungen: (a) gute Kenntnisse in morphologischen und syntaktischen Analysemethoden (b) Bereitschaft, sich (unter Anleitung) in eine fremde Sprache einzuarbeiten (c) technische Grundkenntnisse im Bereich Texteditoren, idealerweise Vertrautheit mit dem Programm ‘Toolbox’ oder ‘Shoebox’. Interessenten melden sich bitte bis 13. März per e-mail bei Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel [balthasar.bickel AT spw.uzh.ch]
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Ingrid Hove joins the department
Ingrid Hove joins the General Linguistics Department as a post-doc research associate in Adrian Leemann's SNSF project 'Swiss VoiceApp - Your voice. Your identity.'
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Giorgio Iemmolo and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich receive GRC for a workshop on landscape and language
Giorgio Iemmolo and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, in collaboration with Curdin Derungs and Flurina Wartmann from the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich, received a Graduate Campus Grant (GRC) for a workshop on "Landscape through the prism of language", to be held in Zurich on June 1st.
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Workshop on Switch Reference organised by Rik van Gijn at next SLE
In cooperation with Jeremy Hammond (MPI Nijmegen) and Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf and MPI Nijmegen), Rik van Gijn will organize a workshop entitled “Switch reference: state of the art and where to go from here?” at the next meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Split, to be held 18-21 September 2013.
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Balthasar Bickel on the editorial board of “Journal of Linguistic Geography”
Balthasar Bickel has joined the editorial board of the newly established "Journal of Linguistic Geography", published by Cambridge University Press.
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Steven Moran co-author on a paper being presented at CUNY
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Publication by Steven Moran et al. in 'Language'
"Revisiting population size vs. phoneme inventory size" by Steven Moran, Daniel McCloy, and Richard Wright has been published in 'Language', Volume 88, Number 4, December 2012, pp. 877-893.
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Workshop organised by Giorgio Iemmolo at next SLE
The workshop proposal on "The typology of adposition and case marker borrowing", organised by Giorgio Iemmolo together with Eitan Grossman (Jerusalem), Petros Karatsareas (Cambridge/Cyprus) and Stéphane Polis (Liège) has been accepted for the next meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Split, to be held in September 2013.
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Steve Moran to present at "Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Areal Typology"
Steve Moran, Johann-Mattis List and Jelena Prokić hold the presentation "Automatic Detection of Borrowings in Lexicostatistic Datasets: A Workflow for Automatic Linguistic Reconstruction" at the "Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Areal Typology" (held conjointly with "KNAW Conference Patterns of Diversification and Contact: A Global Perspective") on December 14, 2012 in Amsterdam.
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Giorgio Iemmolo in Konstanz
Giorgio Iemmolo will give an invited talk at the Linguistisches Kolloquium of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz on "Subject-verb non-agreement in Romance and beyond" on 6 December 2012.
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Talk by Paul Sidwell on "The Proto-Austroasiatic lexicon project"
Paul Sidwell (Australian National University) is giving a talk on "The Proto-Austroasiatic lexicon project: unlocking the missing millennia of Mainland Southeast Asia" in the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Time: Friday 7 December 2012 / 10:15 h Place: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b, 8032 Zürich
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Talk by Seppo Kittilä on "Evidentiality in Finnish"
Seppo Kittilä (University of Helsinki) is visiting our department and will give a talk on "Evidentiality in Finnish: two case studies" in the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Date: Friday, 30 November 2012 / 10:15 h Room: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b
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Balthasar Bickel invited speaker at the KNAW Conference "Patterns of Diversification and Contact: a Global Perspective"
Balthasar Bickel has been invited to give two talks at the KNAW Conference on "Patterns of Diversification and Contact: a Global Perspective", to be held at the University of Amsterdam, 11 to 14 December 2012. On Tuesday, 11 December, he will give a talk in the general session on "The dynamics of areas and universals".And on Thursday, 13 December, he will talk on "Areal Diachronies"in the "Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Areal Typology.
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Talk by Frank Zimmerer on "What massive reductions (do not) tell us"
Frank Zimmerer(Universität Frankfurt) will present a talk at the Department of General Linguistics on "What massive reductions (do not) tell us". Monday, 3 December 2013. Place: Plattenstrasse 54, Room 204.
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Mathias Jenny at the workshop on Mainland Southeast Asian Languages in Leipzig
On December 1st Mathias Jenny will give a talk on "The far Nothwest of Southeast Asia - the languages of Myanmar"at the Workshop "Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: The State of the Art in 2012" in Leipzig.
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Steve Moran at the workshop on "Phylomemetic and Phylogenetic Approaches in the Humanities" in Bern
Steve Moran presents a talk at the workshop on "Phylomemetic and phylogenetic approaches in the humanities". The talk is called "A Python Toolkit for Quantitative Tasks in Historical-Comparative Linguistics"and was co-authored with Johann-Mattis List from the University of Marburg. The workshop will take place at the University of Bern on Saturday, 24 November 2012.
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Talk by Philippe Maurer on Portuguese-based creoles
Philippe Maurer will present a talk at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium on "The extinct Portuguese based Creoles of Batavia and Tugu (Indonesia)". Time: Friday, 23 November 2012. Place: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b
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Giorgio Iemmolo at the workshop on "Clitics in Old Italian" in Pavia
Giorgio Iemmolo will give a talk on "Dislocations with and without clitic in Old Sicilian"at the workshop on "Clitics in Old Italian". The workshop will be held at the University of Pavia on 23 November 2012.
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Two guest lectures by Nikolaus Himmelmann
Nikolaus Himmelmann (Universität Köln) will present two guest lectures. The first will take place as part of the Ringvorlesung "Sprache(n) verstehen"and ist titled "Wie die Sprachwissenschaft zur Empirie fand (und findet)". Time: Thursday, 15 November, 18:15. Place: Universität Zürich-Zentrum, Eingang Karl Schmid-Strasse 4, Hörsaal 180 The second is "On the universality of prosodic units"at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Time: Friday, 16 November, 10:15. Place: GLT-A-02, Gloriastrasse 12b.
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Balthasar Bickel at the workshop on "Phylomemetic and phylogenetic approaches in the humanities" in Bern
Balthasar Bickel is an invited speaker at the workshop on "Phylomemetic and phylogenetic approaches in the humanities". The workshop will be held at the University of Bern on Saturday, 24 November 2012.
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Talk by Balthasar Bickel on linguistic diversity
As part of the lecture series "Sprache(n) verstehen", Balthasar Bickel will present a lecture on linguistic diversity with the title "Sprachliche Vielfalt: universale und regionale Muster". Time: 8 November 2012, 18:15-20:00. Place: Universität Zürich-Zentrum, Eingang Karl Schmid-Strasse 4, Hörsaal 180.
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Giorgio Iemmolo awarded International Short Visit Grant from the SNF
The SNF has awarded Giorgio Iemmolo an International Short Visit Grant for a stay at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) in January-February 2013, where he will start a project on "The typology of adposition borrowing"with Dr. Eitan Grossman and will give talks at the Department of Linguistics and Department of Romance Languages.
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Workshop on simulation models for language change
On November 5 and 6, 2012, the Department of General Linguistics will be hosting a workshop on simulation models for language change, with participants from Nijmegen, Leiden, Munich, Tübingen and Zürich. For more information please contact Balthasar Bickelor Taras Zakharko.
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Steven Moran has joined the department
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Steven Moran has joined the department as a postdoctoral researcher. Steve works on quantitative methods in historical linguistics, phonological typology and the Dogon languages of West Africa.
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Mathias Jenny to present a paper at the International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on "Subject and subject marking" in colloquial Burmese at the 45th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics held at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, on 26-28 October 2012.
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Mathias Jenny presents a paper on Mon at the Austroasiatic workshop in Singapore
Mathias Jenny will present a Mon grammar sketch at the Austroasiatic workshop to be held at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore on October 25, 2012.
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Adrian Leemann, Volker Dellwo and Marie-José Kolly at Phonetik and Phonology 8 in Jena
Adrian Leemann, Volker Dellwo and Marie-José Kolly present a paper and poster at Phonetik und Phonologie 8in Jena. Talk: "Rhythmic differences between read and spontaneous speech: the case of %V" Poster presentation: "Exploring speech temporal features of twins: the case of %V" Conference: Phonetik und Phonologie 8, Jena, 12-13 October 2012.
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Fernando Zúñiga on Balckfoot in the UZH magazine
Fernando Zúñiga's research on Blackfoot is featured in the current issue of the UZH magazine.
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Mathias Jenny to present a paper at Syntax of the World's Lanugages V in Dubrovnik
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on "Form and meaning of clause linkage in Mon" at the conference Syntax of the World's Languages to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
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Talk by Mathias Jenny on language contact and syntactic change in Zürich
Mathias Jenny is giving a talk on "Language contact and syntactic change in Austroasiatic languages” at the workshop Syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction: New perspectivesto be held at the University of Zürich. Date: 29 September 2012.
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Keynote talk on diachronic universals of agreement systems by Balthasar Bickel
Balthasar Bickel, in co-authorship with Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Taras Zakharko and Giorgio Iemmolo, is giving a keynote talk on diachronic universals of agreement systems at a workshop on agreement from a diachronic perspective in Marburg. Date: 5 October 2012)
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Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Giorgio Iemmolo, Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel to present a paper at Syntax of the World's Languages V
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Giorgio Iemmolo, Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel will present a paper on "The same but different: Formal discrepancies in determining the alignment of agreement systems"at the conference "Syntax of the World's Languages V" to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
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Fernando Zúñiga to present a paper at Syntax of the World's Languages V
Fernando Zúñiga will present a paper on "Algonquian relative root complements: a comparative perspective"at Syntax of the World's Languages to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
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Tobias Weber to present a paper at Syntax of the World's Languages V
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "Agent marking splits conditioned by information structure: finding the relevant factors"at Syntax of the World's Languages V to be held in Dubrovnik, 1-4 October 2012.
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Tobias weber to present a paper on indirect diachronic explanations in typology
Tobias Weber will present a paper at the workshop on "Syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction: New perspectives" at the University of Zürich. The title of his paper is "Indirect diachronic explanations in typology: the case of Differential Agent Marking". University of Zürich, 28 to 29 September 2012.
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Robert Schikowski to present a paper at Syntax of the World's Languages V
Robert Schikowski will hold a talk on "Modelling differential object marking in Nepali"at this year's SWL conference in Dubrovnik (1-4 October 2012). Co-authors are Balaram Prasain and Krishna Poudel.
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National Science Foundation grant awarded
The US National Science Foundation has awarded a new research grant on “AGGREGATION: Automatic Generation of Grammars for Endangered Languages from Glosses and Typological Information”to Emily Bender from the Univesity of Washington. The project will collaborate closely with Balthasar Bickel and others from the Chintang research team. Bickel is also a member of the Advisory Board of the project.
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Volker Dellwo, Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly to present paper on speaker identification
Volker Dellwo, Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly will present a paper on "Speaker identification based on temporal information: A forensic phonetic study of speech rhythm and timing in the Zurich variety of Swiss German"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
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Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly to present paper on the smartphone app "Dialäkt Äpp"
Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly will present a paper on "Wissenschaftliches Potenzial der Smartphone-Applikation „Dialäkt Äpp“ für dialektologische Untersuchungen zur Schweizer Sprachlandschaft"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. The paper has been co-authored with Iwar Werlen and Yves Scherrer. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
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Marie-José Kolly and Volker Dellwo to present paper on speech rhythm in foreign accents
Marie-José Kolly and Volker Dellwo will present a paper on "L1-Rhythmus im fremdsprachlichen Akzent? Wie perzeptiv-phonetische Studien Fremdsprachendidaktik und Forensik bereichern können"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
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Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly to present paper on /l/-vocalization in Swiss German
Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly will present a paper on "Hören wir in Zürich bald Pfnüsu und Tubu statt Pfnüsel und Tubel? Das Fortschreiten der /l/-Vokalisierung in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz"at the 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistikin Lugano. The paper has been co-authored with Sibylle Sutter, Dario Brander, Iwar Werlen, Fiona Hasler and Carina Eisenblatt. Conference details: 7. Tage der Schweizer Linguistik, 13.09.2012 - 14.09.2012, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano
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Postdoctoral research position
The General Linguistics Department at the University of Zurich invites applications for a postdoctoral researcher position. The field of specialization is in statistical approaches to areal/historical and/or corpus-based typology.
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Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel to present a paper at the workshop "Unpacking intentional communication in animals" in Zürich
Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel will present a paper on "How do children learn intentional gestures?"at the workshop Unpacking intentional communication in animals: an integrative approach. The paper was co-authored with Elena Lieven from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Date: 5-6 September, 2012 Location: Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich
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Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel to present a paper at SLE 2012 in Stockholm
Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel will present a paper on "Synchronic and diachronic biases in language families"at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea(SLE 2012), to be held in Stockholm between 29 August and 1 September 2012.
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Tobias Weber to present paper at SLE 2012 in Stockholm
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "Voice alternations and grammatical relations: more on the variation of case alignment types"at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2012)to be held in Stockholm between 29 August and 1 September 2012.
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Mathias Jenny to present a paper at the SLE conference in Stockholm
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on Grammatical Relations in Monat the 45th SLE conference in Stockholmon August 30, 2012.
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Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Balthasar Bickel and Fernando Zúñiga at SLE 2012
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Balthasar Bickel and Fernando Zúñiga will be convenors of the workshop "Grammatical Relations beyond Subjects and Objects: 40 Years Later" at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (29 August - 1 September 2012, Stockholm).
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Giorgio Iemmolo to present a paper at the SLE Conference in Stockholm
Giorgio Iemmolo will present a paper on "Symmetric and asymmetric alternations in direct object encoding"at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, to be held at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, 29 August - 1 September 2012.
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Giorgio Iemmolo and Robert Schikowski at the EuroBABEL Final Conference
Giorgio Iemmolo and Robert Schikowski will present a talk on "Differential argument marking and differential agreement"at the concluding conference of the ESF programme EuroBABEL. Conference date: 23-26 August 2012.
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Fernando Zúñiga appointed chair in linugistics at the University of Bern
Fernando Zúñiga has accepted an offer from the University of Bern to take over the chair in general linguistics. Fernando will leave his temporary appointment in Zurich by the end of January 2013.
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Two new publications by Balthasar Bickel
Two papers co-authored by Prof. Balthasar Bickel have recently been published.
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Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel publish book chapter on "How to measure frequency?"
Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel have just contributed a chapter to the collection "Potentials of Language Documentation: Methods, Analyses, and Utilization". Their contribution is called "How to measure frequency? Different ways of counting ergatives in Chintang (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal) and their implications". The collection has been edited by Frank Seifart, Geoffrey Haig, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Dagmar Jung, Anna Margetts and Paul Trilsbeek, and is available for download from the University of Hawai‘i Press (follow the link below).
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Advanced student for research projected wanted
The Zurich Centre for Linguistics, together with the Institute of Computational Linguistics and the Department of General Linguistics, are offering a small project to an advanced student who is interested in the interaction between computational linguistics and psycholinguistics.
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Tobias Weber at the 12th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "Case alignment in Philippine-type languages: discovering diversity within and across languages"at this year's International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (12ICAL) at Udayana University on Bali. Conference date: 2-6 July, 2012.
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Tobias Weber to present poster on non-canonical A marking
Tobias Weber will present a paper on "The rise and demise of non-canonical A marking in two-argument constructions"at the conference on Non-canonically case-marked subjects within and across languages and language families, to be held in Island between 4 and 8 June 2012.
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Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Taras Zakharko to present paper on semantic role clustering
Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Taras Zakharko will present a paper on "Semantic role clustering: an empirical assessment of semantic role types"at the conference on Non-canonically case-marked subjects within and across languages and language families, to be held in Island between 4 and 8 June 2012.
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Tobias Weber to present paper at SEALS conference
Tobias Weber will present a paper with the title "Towards a family portrait of Austroasiatic: phonological characteristics"at the 22nd SEALS conference in France on Thursday 31 May 2012.
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Mathias Jenny to present paper at SEALS conference
Mathias Jenny will present a paper on Differential Subject Marking in Burmeseat the 22nd SEALS conference in France on Thursday 31 May 2012.
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Stellenausschreibung
Am Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft wird ab sofort bzw. zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt 1 studentische Assistenz(zwischen 25-60%, ggf auch in unterschiedlichem Umfang in Semester und in den Semesterferien) angeboten.
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Balthasar Bickel awarded 3-year grant by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme
Together with Andrej Filchenko (Tomsk), Balthasar Bickel was awarded a 3-year grant for a Major Documentation Project by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programmeof the Arcadia Foundation, UK. The project is entitled "Comprehensive Documentation and Analysis of Two Endangered Siberian Languages: legacy data and last speakers of Eastern Khanty and Southern Selkup"and will start on August 1, 2012.
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Talk by Miriam Butt at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium
Miriam Butt from the University of Konstanz will be a guest speaker at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Her talk has the title "From spatial to subject marker". Time: Friday, 25 May, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
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Talk by John Payne at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium
John Payne from the University of Manchester is visiting the department. He will give a talk at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium entitled "Towards a typology of noun phrase constituency". Time: Tuesday, 22 May, 10:15–12:00. Place: GLT-B-01, Gloriastrasse 12B.
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Paper by Giorgio Iemmolo on differential object marking in Chinese accepted for publication
The following paper by Giorgio Iemmolo together with Giorgio Francesco Arcodia (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy) has been accepted for publication. Arcodia Giorgio & Giorgio Iemmolo "Differential object marking and identifiability of the referent: a study of Mandarin Chinese". To appear in a special issue of Linguistics on "Differential object marking: theoretical and empirical issues" guest-edited by Iemmolo Giorgio and Gerson Klumpp.
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Giorgio Iemmolo awarded Postdoc grant
The department would like to congratulate Giorgio Iemmolo on receiving a postdoc grant from the Universiy of Zürich. He has been awarded the grant from the "Forschungskredit der Universität Zürich"for a project on "Case and agreement in comparison".
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Talk by Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky at the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium
Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (Universität Marburg) will give a talk on "Überlegungen zu einem neurobiologisch und sprachübergreifend plausiblen Modell des Sprachverstehens". Time: Friday, 4 May, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
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Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Giorgio Iemmolo at the "Anna Siewierska Memorial Workshop" in Leipzig
Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, and Giorgio Iemmolo will give a talk on "Patterns of alignment in verb agreement"at the "Anna Siewierska Memorial Workshop", which will be held at the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig on 27 April.
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Talk by Johanna Nichols at the Linguistisches Forschungskolloquium
Johanna Nichols (Department of Slavic languages, University of California at Berkeley) will give a talk on "The paleogeolinguistics of some attractor states in morphological typology". Time: Thursday, 26 April 2012, 17:15-18:45. Place: SOD 1-105, Deutsches Seminar, Schönberggasse 9.
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Six new grants at the department!
We are happy to announce that several members of the department were recently involved in succesful grant applications.
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Talk by Sebastian Fedden
Sebastian Fedden will present a talk on "Pronominal indexing and alignment in the Alor-Pantar languages". Time: Friday, 30 March 2012, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
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Fernando Zúñiga invited speaker at LMU Munich
Fernando Zúñiga has been invited to give a plenary lecture at this year's "Diskussionsforum Linguistik in Bayern". The Diskussionsforum takes place at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich from Monday 26 March to Tuesday 27 March.
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Talk by Stefan Evert
Stefan Evert will give a talk on "Häufigkeit und Verteilung in der Korpuslinguistik". Time: Friday, 23 March 2012, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
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Talk by Sabine Stoll at the Linguistisches Forschungskolloquium
Sabine Stoll will give a talk on "Kognitive Universalien vs. formale Lernstrategien". This talk is part of the Linguistisches Forschungskolloquiumat the University of Zurich. Time: Thursday, 15 March 2012, 17:15–18:45 Place: SOD 1-105, Schönberggasse 9, 8001 Zürich
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Accepted for publication
The following paper by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel has been accepted for publication: Stoll, S. & B. Bickel."How to measure frequency? Different ways of counting ergatives in Chintang (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal) and their implications." To appear in the proceedings of a conference on "Potentials of language documentation: methods, analyses, utilization.", ed. by Seifart, F., G. Haig, N. Himmelmann, D. Jung, A. Margetts, P. Trilsbeek, & P. Wittenburg, and to be published by the University of Hawai‘i Press, Manoa.
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Accepted for publication
The following paper by Balthasar Bickel has been accepted for publication: Schiering, R., B. Bickel, & K. Hildebrandt."Stress-timed = word-based? Testing a hypothesis in Prosodic Typology." It will appear in one of the upcoming issues of the journal Language Typology and Universals.
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Talk by Bruno Cartoni
Bruno Carton will give a talk on "Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of Discourse Connectives: Methods and Findings". Time: Friday, 9 March 2012, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL-H-321, Rämistrasse 71.
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Guest lecture by Rik van Gijn
Rik van Gijn (Nijmegen) will present a lecture titled 'A sketch of Yurakaré (Bolivia)'as part of Fernando Zúñiga's lecture series on the Languages of South America. Time: Tuesday, 28 February, 10:15–12:00. Place: KOL E-18, Rämistrasse 71.
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Talk by Rik van Gijn (Nijmegen)
Rik van Gijn will give a talk on 'Comparative construction grammar: subordination strategies in South America'in the Graduiertenkolloquium Linguistik. Time: Thursday, 23 February 2012, 16:15–17:45. Place: ZUG-U-D31 (Seminarraum des Romanischen Seminars, Zürichbergstrasse).
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Giorgio Iemmolo at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Giorgio Iemmolo will present a paper entitled "Are dislocated direct objects clause-external? Evidence from Differential Object Marking systems"at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (University of Berkeley, CA: 11–12 Ferbruary, 2012).
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Guest lecture by Balthasar Bickel at LMU Munich
Balthasar Bickel will present a lecture at the Linguistisches Kolloquiumof the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München.
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Tobias Weber at the NEILS 7 conference
Tobias Weber will give a talk at the Seventh International Conference of the Northeast Indian Linguistics Society(NEILS 7), to be held on 2-4 February in Guwahati, Assam, India. The title of his talk is "Some notes on phonological properties of the languages of Northeast India".
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Mathias Jenny at the NEILS 7 conference
Mathias Jenny will give a talk at the Seventh International Conference of the Northeast Indian Linguistics Society(NEILS 7), to be held on 2-4 February in Guwahati, Assam, India. The title of his talk is "Northeast Indian - Southeast Asian connections: The case of 'give'".
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Fernando Zúñiga starts his SNSF Professorship
Fernando Zúñiga starts his Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship (SNF-Förderungsprofessur). The associated research project is entitled "Islands in an ocean of (poly)synthesis and concatenative morphology. What linguistic theory and typology can learn from selected Amerindian languages".
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Mathias Jenny promoted to Reader (Oberassistent)
Mathias Jenny has been promoted to the position of Reader (Oberassistent) as of 1 February 2012.
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Giorgio Iemmolo defends his PhD thesis
Giorgio Iemmolo will be defending his PhD thesis "Towards a typological study of differential object marking and differential object indexation"on 26th January. Place: Department of Linguistics, University of Pavia, Italy. Time: 26 January, 10am.
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Sabine Stoll at the CLARIN project meeting in Cologne
Sabine stoll takes part in the CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) project meeting of F-AG 3 Linguistische Feldforschung, Ethnologie, Sprachtypologiein Cologne.
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Balthasar Bickel is a discussant at this year's Nijmegen Lectures
Balthasar Bickel takes part in this year's Nijmegen Lectures as a discussant on 9 January, with Nicholas Evans (main lecturer), Michael Cysouw and Asifa Majid (co-discussants).
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Reform of BA and MA curricula
The department has submitted a complete reform of the BA and MA curricula, allowing for more flexibility for students and integrating new courses on methods. For more information please contact our director of studies Mathias Jenny.
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Talk by Walter Bisang (University of Mainz)
Prof. Dr. Walter Bisang (Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) will give a talk on "Sprachliche Komplexität und Arealität: Ostasien, Westafrika und Kreolsprachen". Time: 15. December 2011, 17:15. Place: SOD 1-105, Deutsches Seminar, Schönberggasse 9, 8001 Zürich
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Talk by Aris Xanthos
Dr. Aris Xanthos (IMM, Université de Lausanne) is giving a talk On the measurement of inflectional diversityas part of the Linguistisches Projektkolloquium. Time: Friday, 16.12.2011, 10:15-11:45. Place: SOE-F-7, Schönberggasse 11, 8001 Zürich.
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Talk by Balthasar Bikel on multivariate typology at the Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft
Balthasar Bikel is giving a talk at the Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft(Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern). The title of the talk is Multivariate Typologie. Time: Wednesday, 7.12.2011, 18:15. Place: F-105, Hörraumtrakt Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36, 3012 Bern
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Plenarvortrag von Balthasar Bickel an der LDLT3 in London
Balthasar Bickel wird am 19. Novembereinen Plenarvortrag an der Konferenz über Language Documentation & Linguistic Theoryin London (School of Oriental and African Studies) halten. Thema des Vortrags ist Multivariate typology and field linguistics.
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Vortrag von Balthasar Bickel an der Universität Genf
Balthasar Bickel wird am 15. Novemberam Département de Linguistique der Universität Genf im Rahmen des Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique einen Vortrag halten mit dem Titel Variation and universals in referential density.
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Vortrag von Mathias Jenny bei der Siam Society in Bangkok
Mathias Jenny wird am 15. Novembereinen Vortrag über "The Forgotten Role of the Mons of Siam" vor der Siam Society in Bangkok halten.
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Gastvortrag von Michael Cysouw
Dr. Michael Cysouw (LMU München) wird am 10. Novemberim Rahmen des Graduiertenkolloquiums Linguistik einen Gastvortrag zum Thema Dynamic Typologyhalten. Zeit: Donnerstag, 10.11.2011, 16:15-17:45. Ort: ZUG-U-D31, Romanisches Seminar, Zürichbergstrasse 8.
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Balthasar Bickel und Sabine Stoll am Workshop "Potentials of Language Documentation" in Leipzig
Sabine Stoll und Balthasar Bickel nehmen als Vortragende am Workshop Potentials of Language Documentation: Methods, Analyses, and Utilizationin Leipzig teil. (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, 3-4 November 2011)
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Gastaufenthalt von David Denison
31. Oktober bis 4. November 2011: Gastaufenthalt von David Denison von der University of Manchester im Rahmen des Doktoratsprogramms Linguistik.
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Antrittsvorlesung von Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel
Balthasar Bickel wird am 31. Oktoberseine Antrittsvorlesung als Professor für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft halten. Der Titel der Vorlesung lautet Grammatik im Wechselspiel von Natur und Kultur.Zeit: Montag, 31. Oktober 2011, 17:00–17:45 Uhr. Ort: Aula, KOL G 201, Rämistrasse 71.
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Gastvortrag von Martin Haspelmath
Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath (MPI EVA, Leipzig) wird am 27. Oktoberim Rahmen des Graduiertenkolloquiums Linguistik einen Gastvortrag zum Thema Personenformen und Indexierung in der syntaktischen Typologiehalten. Zeit: Donnerstag, 27.10.2011, 16:15-17:45. Ort: ZUG-U-D31, Romanisches Seminar, Zürichbergstrasse 8.
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Wichtig: Tag der Lehre
Am Mittowch, den 26. Oktober 2011, findet für alle Studierende der Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaftanlässlich des Tags der Lehre eine Informations- und Diskussionveranstaltung zum Studiumstatt. Zeit: 26.10.2011, 10:15–12:00. Ort: KOL-F-118, Rämistrasse 71.
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Vortrag von Taras Zakharko über ToolboxSearch am DoBeS Workshop Erfurt
Taras Zakharko stellt am 15. Oktoberim Rahmen des DoBeS Workshops* ToolboxSearchvor, ein Software-Tool für flexible Suchanfragen an Toolbox-Korpora. *Workshop on the exploitation of the DOBES archive for comparative research on referentiality,IBZ, University of Erfurt, 14–15.10.2011
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Vortrag von Mathias Jenny über Sprachkontaktphänomene in Burma
Dr. Mathias Jenny hält am 12. Oktober 2011einen Vortrag im Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaftan der Universität Bern. Der Titel des Vortrags lautet "Sprachkontaktphänomene in Burma".
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Fernando Zúñiga Mitherausgeber der "Typological Studies in Language"
Fernando Zúñiga ist zum Mitherausgeber der Reihe "Typological Studies in Language" beim Verlag John Benjamins ernannt worden (ab Nummer 101).
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Bibliothekskatalog online abrufbar
Der Bibliothkeskatalog der Seminarbibliothek ist jetzt online abrufbar. Zur Verfügung gestellt werden eine Bücher- und eine Artikel-Abfrage.
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Postdoc in Typologie
Das Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft schreibt eine Postdoc-Stelle in Typologie aus.
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Arbeitsstelle Psycholinguistik
Am 01.08.2011 ensteht an der Philosophischen Fakultät die Arbeitsstelle Psycholinguistik. Ihre Leiterin wird Dr. Sabine Stoll.
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Stellenausschreibungen
Das Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft schreibt zwei Doktoratsstellen und eine Postdoc-Stelle aus.
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Neuer Seminarleiter
Ab dem 1. April 2011 ist Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel Leiter des Seminars.
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Plenary talk at ALS by Sabine Stoll
Sabine Stoll has been invited by the Australien Linguistic Society to give a plenary talk on “Syntactic mixing across generations” at the ALS annual meeting, taking place from 9 - 11 December at the Western Sydney University.