2014
News list
-
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)
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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)
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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“.
-
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".
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
PHOIBLE by Steven Moran et al. released
We're proud to announce the release of the world's largest database of phonological inventories, PHOIBLE, by Steven Moran et al.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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).
-
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.
-
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?".
-
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”).
-
Elena Lieven is visiting the Psycholinguistics Laboratory
Prof. Elena Lieven (University of Manchester) is visiting the Psycholinguistics Laboratory, August 26-28
-
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)
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
Johanna Nichols visiting
Johanna Nichols (UC Berkeley) is visiting our institute 18 - 30 June.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Paul Sidwell visiting
Paul Sidwell (ANU, Canberra) is visiting our institute 1 - 18 June.
-
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.
-
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
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
Sabine Stoll’s ERC project featured in the UZH News
Please follow the link below, to find the article.
-
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"
-
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.
-
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:
-
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:
-
Diana Schackow defended PhD thesis
Diana Schackow successfully defended her PhD thesis on Aspects of Yakkha Grammar on February 25, 2014. Congratulations!
-
Mark Aronoff visiting our institute
Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University, NY) is visiting our institute as visiting researcher March 17-21.
-
Harald Hammerström visiting our institute
Harald Hammerström (MPI for Psycholingiustics, Nijmegen) is visiting our institute as guest researcher March 18-19.
-
Robert Forkel visiting our institute
Robert Forkel (MPI-EVA, Leipzig) is visiting our institute as guest researcher March 18-19.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).