The Research Training Group on Nominal Modification at the Goethe University Frankfurt
The Department of Romance Studies, Faculty of Modern Language of Modern Languages of Goethe University Frankfurt offers full funding for 1 position as Doctoral Researcher (E13 TV-GU, 65%-part-time) as a part of RTG ‘Nominal Modification‘. Due date for applications is October 31, 2020. For the details of application and requirements please click here.
The 13th Annual conference on Syntax, Phonology, and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 13) will take place on September 24-29, 2020 online. Our GK student, Sebastian Bredemann will present his research on “The role of phonology in Vata adjectival agreement ” on September 26th (Saturday, @3:00 pm CET; GMT+2; Budapest time), abstract can be downloaded here. Information on Continue Reading
The 15th Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (SLS 15) will take place on September 4-6, 2020 online. Our GK student, Sanja Srdanović will present her joint work with Esther Rinke on “Possessive pronouns do not c-command out of the noun phrase in Serbian” on September 5th (Saturday, @3:30 pm UTC -4, Eastern Daylight Continue Reading
Immediately following Michael Erlewine’s talk, virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting two talks by doctoral researchers of GK. Priscilla Adenuga will present her research on Plural sensitivity to animacy and definiteness: crosslinguistic evidence (abstract) and Melanie Hobich will present her research entitled On wh-exclamatives (abstract). When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to Continue Reading
On Tuesday, June 14th virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting 3 talks. The first talk by our guest speaker Michael Erlewine will be on Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan. This talk will start at 2:15. Please send an e-mail to to get access link to Zoom meeting room. Abstract In both Tibetan and Continue Reading
On Tuesday, June 7th virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting talks by Lydia Grohe entitled Multiple adjectival modification in child spontaneous speech and in the adult input (abstract) and Yat Han Lai entitled The production of non-canonical orders (abstract). When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to get access link)
On Tuesday, June 30th virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting talks by Sebastian Bredemann entitled On the influence of phonology in morphological realization (abstract) and Abigail Bimpeh entitled Control Phenomena in Ewe (abstract). When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to get access link)
On Tuesday, June 23rd virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Ted Gibson entitled ‘Information processing and cross-linguistic universals’. See below for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to get access link) Information processing and cross-linguistic universals Finding explanations for the observed variation in human languagesis the primary goal of linguistics, and Continue Reading
On Tuesday, June 16th virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting talks by Sanja Srdanović entitled Possessive pronouns do not c-command out of the noun phrase in Serbian: Evidence from a self-paced reading task‘(abstract) and Emine Şahingöz entitled On the traces of i (abstract). When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to get access link)
On Tuesday, June 2nd virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting talks by Fenna Bergsma entitled ‘Case competition in headless relatives: a Germanic typology‘ and Ruby Sleeman entitled ‘Modifying superlatives: German ordinal-compounding vs. the Dutch exceptive op…na‘. See below for the abstracts. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to get access link) Case competition in headless Continue Reading
On Tuesday, May 26th virtual GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Astrid Gößwein entitled ‘Double center embedding of prenominal participle constructions and relative clauses in German’. See below for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to get access link) Double center embedding of prenominal participle constructions and relative clauses in German Center embedded structures Continue Reading
On Tuesday, May 19th GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Marcin Morzycki entitled ‘Interpreting Multiple Superlatives: Covert Modality and Semantic Viruses’. See below for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: Online via Zoom(please send an e-mail to to get access link) Interpreting Multiple Superlatives: Covert Modality and Semantic Viruses Multiple occurrences of superlative morphology in the same clause systematically Continue Reading
An extended version of the GK Research Program is online and can be seen by clicking here!
Merle Weicker, alumna of the GK, has been awarded the Wilhelm von Humboldt price for the best dissertation by the German Linguistics Society (DGfS). The awards ceremony will take place during the annual DGfS conference, March 4, in Hamburg.For more information about the price see here: https://dgfs.de/de/aktuelles/2020/nachwuschpreis-traegerin-2020-merle-weicker.html. For more information about the DGfS conference see here: https://www.zfs.uni-hamburg.de/dgfs2020
On Tuesday, February 4th GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Shanley Allen entitled ‘The role of information density and cross-linguistic influence in the L2 Processing of complex nominal compounds’. See below for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: SH 0.107 The role of information density and cross-linguistic influence in the L2 processing of complex nominal Continue Reading
On Tuesday, February 11th GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by David Erschler entitled ‘Depictives in Ossetic and Cross-Linguistic Variation in Modification by Depictives’. See below for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: SH 0.107 Depictives in Ossetic and Cross-Linguistic Variation in Modification by Depictives Depictives are adjectival phrases that modify a participant without forming Continue Reading
On Tuesday, January 28th GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Sebastian Bredemann entitled Adjectival Agreement in Vata. Please click here for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: SH 0.107
On Tuesday, January 21th GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Martina Wiltschko entitled ‘Let’s interact with high end nominals’. See below for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: SH 0.107 Let’s interact with high end nominals! In recent years there has been increasing interest in the syntax of speech acts to the effect that Continue Reading
A workshop on Formal and Experimental Approaches to Adjectival Modification, organized by GK Students, will be held on January 31-February 1, 2020, at the Goethe University Frankfurt. For further details and registration please visit on the Workshop Website: https://sites.google.com/view/feamfrankfurt/
On Tuesday, January 14th GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Peter Hallman entitled Comparison and adjective ordering in Arabic. See below for the abstract. When: 4:15 pm-6:00 pmWhere: SH 0.107 Comparison and adjective ordering in Arabic Adjective ordering in English and Arabic have been analyzed as mirror images of each other. Noun phrases in Continue Reading
On Tuesday, December 17th GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Melanie Hobich entitled KIND-interrogatives as predication? See below for the abstract. When: 4pm (c.t.)-6pmWhere: SH 0.107 KIND-interrogatives as predicational? The literature on the “was für/wat voor/cto za” construction often makes reference to the predicational “nature” of this particular KIND interrogative found in Germanic, Baltic Continue Reading
On Tuesday, December 3rd GK Colloquium will be hosting a talk by Emine Şahingöz entitled Digor-Ossetic Definite Particle i. Click to see the abstract. When: 4pm (c.t.)-6pmWhere: SH 0.107
On Tuesday, November 26th at 4pm (c.t.) at SH 0.107, Sanja Srdanović will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. See below for the abstract. Title: Cataphoric pronoun resolution in Serbian Abstract: It has been shown that c-command has an effect on the acceptability of coreference in pronoun-name constructions (cataphoric binding/backward anaphor) (cf. 1a and 1b). The ungrammaticality Continue Reading
On Tuesday, November 5th at 4:30 pm at the Seminarhaus (SH) 0.107, Lisa Cheng (Leiden University) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Verb-stranding Ellipsis: evidence from Cantonese Abstract:Landau (2018) argues that object gaps in Hebrew are not results of Verb-stranding VP Ellip- sis. He further suggests that X-stranding XP-ellipsis is very limited cross-linguistically. In Continue Reading
On Tuesday, October 22th at 4pm in SH 0.107, Fenna Bergsma will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Deriving a typology of case mismatches in free relatives Abstract: This talk focuses on case mismatches in free relatives. An example is given below. The predicate internal to the relative clause (vertraust `trust’) assigns dative case, and the predicate Continue Reading
The twelfth conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 12) will be held on September 12–14, 2019 at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, in Brno (Czech Republic). Our GK students Fenna Bergsma and Ruby Sleeman will present their recent research there. Fenna Bergsma will give a joint talk with Jan Don on “Gender: Continue Reading
The 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 52) will take place on August 21-24, 2019 at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Our GK student, Ruby Sleeman will present her work on “The second best word order: how ordinals restrict superlatives and why it’s not reciprocated”.
The 31st West African Languages Congress (WALC 31) will take place on August 11-15, 2019 at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University, Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Our GK student, Sebastian Bredemann will give a talk on “Capturing the properties of phonological agreement systems under strict modularity”.
On Tuesday, June 18th, at 4pm in SH 5.105, Elly van Gelderen (Arizona State University) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Remarks on nominal modification Abstract: This talk investigates a number of facets regarding prenominal modifiers, some of it based on your (Uni Frankfurt grad students) interests and some on mine, the Continue Reading
The 34th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW 34) will take place on June 14 and 15 in Konstanz, Germany. Our GK student, Melanie Hobich will give a talk on “The diachrony of was für”.
On Tuesday, June 11th, at 4pm in SH 5.105, Zorica Puškar Gallien (ZAS, Berlin) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Disassembling and reassembling pronouns Abstract: Looking at personal pronouns in the Slavic family, local-person (1st and 2nd person) can be taken to differ from 3rd person in the following respects: (i) Continue Reading
On Tuesday, June 4th, at 4pm in SH 5.105, Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Head-final relative clauses and animacy effects: What corpus patterns and psycholinguistic studies can tell us Abstract: Animacy guides language processing in deep-reaching ways. In this talk, I explore the consequences Continue Reading
On Tuesday, May 21st, at 4pm in SH 5.105, Dr Hannah Sande (Georgetown University) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Doubly morphologically conditioned phonology Abstract: Phonological alternations can be unconditioned, applying uniformly across a language, no matter the context. They can also be specific to particular morphological environments, like English velar softening Continue Reading
TripleA 6 will take place from May 31st to June 2nd, 2019 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the USA. Our GK student, Abigail Anne Bimpeh will give a talk on “Puzzling sloppy readings of the logophoric pronoun yè in Ewe” (with Frank Sode).
The 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics will be held on May 23rd to May 25th, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Our GK student, Abigail Anne Bimpeh will give a talk on “Accounting for logophoricity: The case of Ewe and Jula” (with Alassane Kiemtoré) and present her poster on “Logophoric Licensing in Ewe”.
Germanic Sandwich 2019 will take place on May 23 & 24, 2019 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Our GK student, Ruby Sleeman will present her work on “DP-internal modification: Ordering ordinals and superlatives in Dutch and German”.
CLS 55 will take place on May 16th to 18th at the University of Chicago, the USA. Our GK student, Sebastian Bredemann will give a talk on “Phonological agreement as phonological correspondence”.
On Tuesday, May 14th, at 4pm in SH 5.105, Professor Shravan Vasishth (University of Potsdam) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: “Prenominal relatives clauses in Mandarin: Implications for theories of sentence processing”.Abstract: Models of retrieval processes in sentence processing [3, 6, 1, 8] predict that increasing head-dependent distance in linguistic dependencies Continue Reading
On May 3rd, 2019, Sarah Duong Phu successfully defended her thesis entitled “Discontinuous noun phrases in Vietnamese”. Congratulations!
On April 30th, 2019, Eugenia Fahrnbach successfully defended her thesis entitled “Variation in enclitic possessive constructions in Southern Italian dialects: a syntactic analysis”. Congratulations!
The 42nd GLOW conference (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) will be hosted by the University of Oslo from the 7th to 11th May 2019. Our GK student, Fenna Bergsma will present her work on “Verum focus in Frisian”.
Stony Brook University will host Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics conference on May 3-5, 2019. Our GK student, Sanja Srdanović will give a talk on “The referential properties of Serbian possessive constructions: clitics vs. strong pronouns”.
CamCoS 8 (Cambridge Comparative Syntax) will take place at St John’s College in Cambridge 2-4 May 2019. Our GK student, Melanie Hobich will give a talk on “From head to clause: A diachronic approach to was für as predication” .
On April 18th, 2019, Merle Weicker successfully defended her thesis entitled “The role of semantic complexity for the acquisition of adjectives”. Congratulations!
On Tuesday, May 7th, at 4pm in SH 5.105, Professor Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania ) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Language shapes children’s understanding of number Abstract: Only humans learn language and only humans develop the concept of natural number: How are these two abilities related? We propose that Continue Reading
The official inauguration of the 2nd funding period of the Research Training Group on ‘Nominal Modification’ will take place on April 23, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM in Room IG 1.314 (Eisenhower-Room), Uni Campus Westend. Prof. Dr. Esther Rinke, our new spokesperson of the RTG will open the event, followed by welcoming addresses of Continue Reading
On Tuesday, April 16th, at 4pm in SH 0.104, Professor Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: How abstract are real Mental Representations?Searching for the right formulation of recursion in language and Math if they emerge together on the developmental path. Abstract: Recent work in Minimalism (Chomsky Continue Reading
On March 19, 2019, the “Deutsch-Mittelmeerisches Netzwerk Sprachwissenschaft“ (DeMiNeS) (German Mediterranean Network on Linguistics) will host a master class for students and recent doctorate recipients with Prof. Artemis Alexiadou (Linguistics, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Leibniz-ZAS). The event will take place at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Our student, Ruby Sleeman will present her work on Continue Reading
The Second International Conference on Theoretical East Asian Psycholinguistics (ICTEAP-2) will be held on March 16 to 17 at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Our GK student, Yat Han Lai will present his work on “ Information structure and word order in Cantonese: An experimental approach ”.
ConSOLE 2019 will be hosted by the Leibniz-Preis Research Unit for (Experimental) Syntax and Heritage Languages (RUESHeL) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on February 21st to 23rd 2019. Our GK student, Priscilla Lola Adenuga, will give a talk on “Relabelling Adjunction: A modification analysis of plural marking in Ògè“.