Author: Anke Himmelreich

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, February 12, 5 – 6 pm in IG 3.104. Emine Şahingöz (Goethe University) will present “Ossetic Phrasal Accent - A first Approach”. Abstract: In this talk I will first give a brief introduction to the accentuation rules of Ossetic (described below) and illustrate previous research on the Ossetic accent. Afterwards I will present my methodology and plans for upcoming fieldwork.  The accentuation rules are relatively comprehensible: the stress in Ossetic (resp. the Iron dialect, as in Digor the rules differ), in separate words as well as in syntagmas (resp. phrases), depends on the distribution of strong (a, e, i, o, u) and weak (æ, y) vowels; the first two vowels in a word or word group decide the stressed syllable. If the first vowel is a strong one, it is stressed. But if the first vowel is weak, usually the second syllable is stressed: 1) strong-strong  2) strong-weak  3) weak-strong  4) weak-weak  xábar (‘news’ sg.)  bíræ (‘many’)  xæʒár (‘house’)  fyldǽr (‘more’)  Affected syntagmas are connected and share a single stress, by which a considerable amount of words appear without an independent accent (Abaev 1949: 10 ff.). In the Iron...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, February 12, 4 – 5 pm in IG 3.104. Sebastian Bredemann (Goethe University) will present “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 language Abuq (Nekitel 1986), where the final segment of the noun determines the agreement marking on adjectives and verbs. The noun almil ‘bird’ in (1) ends on [l] and accordingly the agreement morpheme on the verb and the adjective are realized as [l]. The noun ihiaburuh ‘butterfly’ in (2) has the final consonant [h], and thus the agreement on the verb and the adjective is realized as [h]. The final consonant of the noun can take any form allowed by the phonology in word-final position. Therefore, it must be assumed that noun-final consonants are not the exponents of a...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Recent Trends in Language Acquisition Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, February 12, 2 – 4 pm in IG 3.301. Tom Fritzsche will present "Data analysis with linear mixed models: A practical example from language acquisition". Abstract: Linear mixed-effects (LME) models have become the standard in analysing psycholinguistic and psychological data. Compared to t-tests and ANOVAs LME models offer numerous advantages but also require additional attention for specifying a model as each can (and needs to) be tailored to the structure (and the amount) of the data. Advantages and challenges will be discussed using a specific data set: Szendrői et al. (2017). The paper along with the code is available online (links below). The purpose of this presentation is to go through the analysis of this study in R and address questions regarding: - model specification - contrast coding - fixed & random components - factors & continuous predictors - model evaluation and selection - limits...

Horst Lohnstein will give a talk in the Semantics Colloqium on January 24th, 4-6 pm in IG 4.301. You are cordially invited! Title: (In-)Finitheit und die Konsequenzen Abstract: Finitheit ist eine grammatische Kategorie, die sich durch die Subkategorien Tempus, Modus und Agr konstituiert. Infinitheit weist diese Subkategorien nicht auf. Entsprechend werden infinite bzw. semi-finite (Imperative) Konstruktionen anders interpretiert als finite. In dem Vortrag geht es um die Charakterisierung selbstständiger Satztypen auf syntaktischer und semantischer Ebene und die entsprechenden flexionsmorphologischen Markierungen. Das Zusammenspiel der verschiedenen Komponenten führt zu einer Theorie der Verbzweit-Stellung und der linken Satzperipherie. Unter evolutionärer Perspektive deuten sich verschiedene Konsequenzen für die Entwicklung der Menschheit an....