On April 18th, 2019, Merle Weicker successfully defended her thesis entitled “The role of semantic complexity for the acquisition of adjectives”. Congratulations!

We are happy to announce that Professor Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania) will be giving a mini-course in three sessions on May 13th, 15th and 17th. See below for details! 13.05. 14-17 Room 6.201 1 Type, Token, and Sparse Data Quantitative analysis of lexical and syntactic learning data shows that there is preciously little highly informative Continue Reading

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“.

On February 14th, 2019, Yranahan Traoré successfully defended his thesis entitled “The Morphology and the Phonology of the Nominal Domain in Tagbana”. Congratulations!

Incontro di Grammatica Generativa 45 (IGG45) will be held from February 21st – 23rd at the University of Padua, Italy. Our GK student, Ruby Sleeman, will present her work on “Variation and its limits in ordinal-superlative order in Dutch”.

On Tuesday, February 12th at 4pm in SH 3.104, we will have two speakers in the GK colloquium: Sebastian Bredemann and Emine Şahingöz. See below for abstracts. Speaker: Sebastian Bredemann Time: 4-5pm Title: Phonological agreement Abstract: Phonological agreement (PA) is a phenomenon under which agreement is determined by the phonological properties of a noun. Examples are given in (1) and (2) for the Continue Reading

On Tuesday, February 5th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Astrid Gößwein will give a talk in the GK colloquium.   Title: Extended nominal modifiers – participle constructions in German and English   Abstract:  Extended prenominal modifiers in German have notable sentential properties, especially when the adjectival element is a participle. (1)  die  das Sofa    zerstörende Katze  (hat vermutlich   Continue Reading

On Tuesday, January 29th, at 4pm in SH 3.104, Professor David Adger (Queen Mary University of London) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Meaningless Movements in the Noun Phrase Abstract: There has been much discussion recently about the status of Head Movement: is it syntactic, and expected to feed meaning, or morphological, and hence expected Continue Reading

On Tuesday, January 22nd at 4pm in SH 3.104, Melanie Hobich will give a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: From head to phrase to clause. The syntactic change of quantifiers in Germanic and its implications for ‘was für’ Abstract:   The was für (‘what kind of’) construction (WFC) has been much called on in the literature. The construction has been analysed Continue Reading

The talk of Professor Natalia Gagarina will take place On Tuesday, January 15th at 4pm in SH 3.104. Title: Referentiality in bilingual oral and written texts Abstract: The goal of this talk is to trace the developmental trajectory of referentiality in Russian-German bilinguals and to compare monolingual and bilingual strategies of the use of referential cohesive desives. While referentiality in elicited narratives has Continue Reading

On Tuesday, January 15th, there will be an additional GK colloquium talk, given by Professor Marcel den Dikken (Eötvös Loránd University) at 12pm in SH 5.105.   Title: One syntax for all: A unified representational system for syntax and phonology   Abstract: In the development of the generative perspective on linguistic analysis over the past half century, the approaches to the phrase Continue Reading

Our GK student, Fenna Bergsma presented her work on ‘PPs and DPs in free relatives’, held from January 3rd to 6th, 2018 in New York, the USA.

On December 21st, 2018, Maria Kofer successfully defended her thesis entitled “Definiteness and nominal modification in the Balkan languages”. Congratulations!

On December 19th, 2018, Mariam Kamarauli successfully defended her thesis entitled “The Nominal Domain in Georgian. A Diachronic Analysis”. Congratulations!

On Tuesday, December 18th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Sanja Srdanović will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Binding Principle B in Serbian possessive constructions: clitics vs. strong pronouns Abstract: According to the Universal DP Hypothesis, it is claimed that all languages have a DP, including articleless languages (Bašić, 2004; Progovac, 1998). On the other hand, other Continue Reading

On Tuesday, December 11th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: D: A spurious category Abstract In minimalism, it is common practice to assume that D is a primitive category, arguably present in all languages (cf. Longobardi 1994 vs. Chierchia 1998), or a phase subject to parametric Continue Reading

On 30th November, our GK student, Fenna Bergsma will give a talk and participate in the Nanosyntax weblab.

On Tuesday, December 4th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Abigail Bimpeh will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: On (anti)logophoricity in Ewedomegbe   Abstract:   It has been established in the literature that attitude reports are a necessary environment for logophoricity cross linguistically (e.g. Culy 1994a, Schlenker 1999, among others). In this talk, exploring Culy’s (1994) hierarchy Continue Reading

On Tuesday, November 27th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Ruby Sleeman will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Prenominal modifiers in Dutch: ordinals and superlatives   Abstract: Ordinal numbers are an interesting topic from the point of view of several different fields of linguistic study: the morphology of Dutch and German ordinals (and English first) points to a potential Continue Reading

On Tuesday, November 20th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Lydia Grohe will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Round blue table or blue round table: The production of double prenominal adjectives in acquisition Abstract: The presence of multiple adjectives in prenominal position is subject to ordering restrictions in adult language. These restrictions are usually explained via notion Continue Reading

On Tuesday, November 13th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Lai Yat Han will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Processing non-canonical structures in Cantonese Abstract: In the acceptability judgement tasks, native Cantonese speakers were asked to rate sentences that involve preposed sentence objects, while the canonical word order in Cantonese is subject-verb-object (SVO). The experiment tests the motivations Continue Reading

On Tuesday, November 6th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Cambridge) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium. Title: Aspects of linguistic complexity in bilingual children’s grammars Abstract:   Bilingual children have often been shown to have lower language proficiency when compared with monolingual children. Studies which show this difference usually examine bilingual children’s use Continue Reading

On October 30th, Fenna Bergsma will give a talk on ‘Waarmee and met wat in Dutch free relatives’, in Oberseminar English Linguistics (Syntax–Semantics), Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

On Tuesday, October 30th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Gregory Scontras (University of California, Irvine) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium.Title: The role of subjectivity in adjective ordering preferences Abstract: From English to Hungarian to Mokilese, speakers exhibit strong ordering preferences in multi-adjective strings: “the small brown box” sounds far more natural than “the brown small box.” Continue Reading

On Tuesday, October 23rd at 4pm in SH 3.104, Lyn Frazier (University of Massachusetts Amherst) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium.Title: Processing ellipsis: The circumstances of repairAbstract:There is evidence from the processing of mismatch ellipsis that an antecedent for an elided constituent will be repaired when it does not syntactically match the elided constituent.  Such repair operations do not take place indiscriminately but rather Continue Reading

Our GK student, Fenna Bergsma will give a talk at PlaCiG – On the place of case in grammar, held from October 18 to October 20, 2018 in Rethymnon, Crete, Greece . The talk is titled  ‘PPs and DPs in Free relatives’.

The A0 Workshop will take place in Bled, Slovenia from 11 to 13 October 2018 on the Adjective as a lexical category. This Workshop is part of “The categorical status of adjectives: from theory to typology, and back again” project. Our GK student, Priscilla Adenuga will give a talk on “The Nominal Attributive Modifiers (NAMs) in Ògè”.

The GK colloquium season will kick off with our first speakers Priscilla Adenuga and Fenna Bergsma on Tuesday, October 16th, from 16-18 in SH 3.104. Priscilla Adenuga: “Relabelling Adjunction: A modification analysis in Ògè”  In this talk, I show that plural marking is not obligatory in Ògè because it lacks agreement; rather, it belongs to the group of languages that syntactically mark plural with the Continue Reading

Our GK student, Abigail Anne Bimpeh will present her work on ‘Default de se: The interpretation of the Ewe logophor’ at CALL 2018, held from 30th August to 1st September in Leiden, the Netherlands.

Our GK student, Priscilla Lola Adenuga presented her work on ‘Nominal Modification in Ògè and Yorùbá’ at WOCAL9, held from August 25th-28th in Rabat, Morocco .

Our GK student, Abigail Anne Bimpeh presented her work on ‘Default de se: The interpretation of the Ewe logophor’ at LAG 2018, held from 30th July to 1st August in Ghana.

Lecture series in three sessions as part of the Graduate School Nominal Modification. Tuesday 10.07., 10-14, SH 0.108 Wednesday 11.07. 12-16, SH 0.108 Thursday 12.07. 12-16, SH 4.103 (note the room change) Negation is a much-studied aspect of natural language and as a consequence of that study we have an unusually rich and complete typological Continue Reading

Talk as part of the project “Propositionalismus in der linguistischen Semantik” Ivano Caponigro (University of California San Diego) “Richard Montague’s Turn Towards Natural Language ” Time: Tue, 10.07.2018, 4 – 6. Location: SH 3.104 In the early 60s, Richard Montague still believed that: “[The] systematic exploration of the English language, indeed of what might be Continue Reading

Our GK student Fenna Bergama will give a talk in the Colloquium Syntax and its Interfaces at Universität Leipzig on 26th June. The title of her talk is: Grafting nanosyntactic trees: an analysis of case mismatches in free relatives.

We are pleased to announce that next week, Florian Schwarz (UPenn) will be giving two talks, on June 27th (2pm – 4pm) and June 29th (2pm – 4pm). He will also give a third talk on July 11th (2pm – 4pm) and a workshop on July 4th (4pm – 6pm) and 6th (2pm – 4pm). Please see below for details! June 27 (2pm – 4pm, SH 4.102)   Redundancy Continue Reading

On Tuesday, June 26 at 4pm in SH 3.104, Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University) will be giving a talk at the GK colloquium. Gestural SemanticsPhilippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University) Experimental part with Lyn Tieu (Western Sydney University) and Emmanuel Chemla (LSCP, CNRS)We argue that most of the typology of inferences in natural language Continue Reading

Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Microvariation (TEAM 2018) will be held from 14 to 15 June in Padua, Italy. Our researchers, Ruby Sleeman and Nicolas Lamoure, will present their work. Ruby Sleeman: “Ordinal numerals in dialects of Dutch” Nicolas Lamoure: “D° ellipsis in D>N>&>N structures: Evidence from micro-variation in (Standard) Italian”  

The Fourth International Conference on Linguistics and Language Studies (ICLLS 2018) will be held from 15 to 16 June  in Hong Kong. Our GK student, Yat Han Lai will present his work on “Grammatical weight and relative clause processing in German and Cantonese”.

We are happy to announce that Professor Larry Hyman (University of California in Berkeley) will be giving a mini-course in two sessions on June 14th and 15th (2-4pm). See below for details! Place & time: Thursday, June 14, 2-4: SP 1.01 Friday, June 15, 2-4: SH 1.109 Abstracts: Class 1: Tone Systems: An overview   In this first class, I begin by Continue Reading

The 28th Colloquium on Generative Grammar (CGG 28) will be held from May 30th to June 1st in Tarragona, Spain. Our GK student, Fenna Bergsma will present her work on “Case mismatches in free relative constructions”.

Our new postdoc, Heidi Klockmann, will give a talk on May 29th, at 4pm in SH 3.104. Title: From N to Q: The morphosyntax of Polish and English quantificational expressions Abstract: Quantificational expressions like numerals (two, three, a hundred), quantifiers (a few, a dozen), and pseudopartitives (a bunch, a lot, a ton) often show a surface resemblance Continue Reading

We are happy to announce that Prof. Tom Leu from Université du Québec à Montréal will teach a minicourse on the morphosyntax around German d  on June 7th and 8th, 2018. Schedule: Thursday 7.6:  14-16 in SP 0.02 (Seminarpavillon) Friday 8.6:      10-12 in SH 1.101 (Seminarhaus) Friday 8.6:      14 – 16 Continue Reading

Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT) will give a colloquium talk on May 15th, at 4pm in SH 3.104. Title: Deriving Case Theory Abstract: Case Theory has been central to predicting where DPs occur in a clause. The idea is that (i) a DP is assigned Case by a local [-N] head; (ii) every DP must have Continue Reading

The 18th International Morphology Meeting will be held in Budapest from 10th to 13th of April, 2018. Our GK student, Sanja Srdanović, will present her work on “Would it be faster, slower or the same with additional morphemes? The (Non)-existence of the Decomposition in the Processing of Deverbal Nominals” (with Anja Šarić and Isidora Gatarić).

Prof. Dr. Malte Zimmermann from the University of Potsdam will give a colloquium talk on May 8th, at 4pm in SH 3.104. Title: Find Construction Analyze: Making Sense of Serial Verb Constructions Abstract: The objectives of the talk are threefold: First, to discuss a range of empirical diagnostics (Adv-modification, A-quantification, cumulation, negation, reordering) for elucidating the Continue Reading