2015
News list
-
-
-
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.
-
-
-
-
Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer are granted funds by the Lietuvos Mokslo Taryba (Lithuanian Research Council)
-
Daniel Friedrichs to give invited talks at University of Cambridge and UCL Speech Science Forum
-
-
Publication by Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly on the effect of dialect imitation on speech rhythm
-
New book edited by Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly, Stephan Schmid & Volker Dellwo
-
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
-
Mathias Jenny receives ETH Global seed money for cooperation in research and teaching with Mandalay University (Myanmar)
-
Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer to give presentations at the 12th International Congress of Balticists in Vilnius
-
Balthasar Bickel to give keynote talk at conference on phylogenetic algorithms in linguistics
-
27.10.2015 UNESCO World Day of Audiovisual Heritage: "Geschichten aus dem Dorfleben von Diepoldsau"
-
Programme workshop Inheritance Hierarchies in Morphology online
The programme for the workshop "Inheritance Hierarchies in Morphology", organized by Rik van Gijn (IVS), Anja Hasse (DS), Patrick Mächler (DS), Tania Paciaroni (ROM), and Florian Sommer (IVS) is now available online.
-
New publication by Rik van Gijn and colleagues on subordination strategies in Tupian languages
Together with Ana Vilacy Galucio and Fernanda Nogueira, Rik van Gijn published a paper in the Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi on the diversity of subordination strategies in the South American Tupian language family. Available here.
-
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.
-
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".
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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".
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
10-14 August 2015: Phoneticians in Glasgow
ICPhS, the most important conference in phonetics, is attended by a number of actual, former and affiliated members of our department:
Volker Dellwo, Kostis Dimos, Daniel Friedrich, Lei He, Yshai Kalmanovitch, Marie-José Kolly, Adrian Leemann, Hanna Ruch, and Stephan Schmid.
-
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)
-
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".
-
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.
-
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".
-
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:
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
Edisyn VIII co-organized by Florian Sommer and Dieter Studer-Joho
The Edisyn VIII workshop, taking place 11-13 June 2015, is co-organized by institute members Florian Sommer and Dieter Studer-Joho together with colleagues from the German and Romance departments. For details see the Edisynhomepage.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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)
-
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
-
Steven Moran and colleagues publish new online database 'Tsammalex'
Christfried Naumann & Steven Moran & Guillaume Segerer & Robert Forkel (eds.) 2015. Tsammalex: A lexical database on plants and animals. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Volker Dellwo on SRF "Kulturplatz Schweiz“
Volker Dellwo on SRF "Kulturplatz Schweiz“ (Wednesday 22th of April)
-
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.
-
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).
-
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:
-
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".
-
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.
-
Sprachgeschichte, in Schellack gepresst
Im Unijournal (S. 11) wurde ein Artikel über die Schätze des Phonogrammarchivs publiziert.
-
ZüKL-Podcast on speech rhythm with Stephan Schmid
For the ZüKL-Podcast on speech rhythm with Stephan Schmid follow the link attached below.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
'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.