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Together with Lenore Grenoble (U Chicago), Dave Peterson (Dartmouth) and Alan Timberlake (Columbia U), Balthasar Bickel edited a volume on «Language Typology and Historical Contingency» as a festschrift for Johanna Nichols. The book appeared in the Typological Studies of Language series at Benjamins:
Steven Moran speaks about "Qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of Dogon languages" at the Colloquium Seminar in the Linguistic Department at the University of Stockholm, December 12th, 2013.
The article 'Symmetric and asymmetric alternations in direct object encoding' by Giorgio Iemmolo has been published in 'STUF – Language Typology and Universals', volume 66, 4, December 2013, pp. 378-403.
Prof. Dr. Michele Loporcaro has been appointed affiliated faculty member at the Department of General Linguistics. Professor Loporcaro's main affiliation remains with the Department of Romance languages, but he is now professor of Romance and General Linguistics.
New book co-edited by Sabine Stoll together with Edith Bavin (LaTrobe U., Melbourne) on the acquisition of ergativity, published by Benjamins. With contributions by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel.
Kaius Sinnemäki (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki) is visiting our institute as guest researcher November 25-29, 2013.
Paul Sidwell (ANU, Canberra) is visiting our institute as guest researcher November 21-29, 2013.
On Friday, November 29, and Saturday, November 30, 2013, the Department of General Linguistics will host an inter-university meeting at which scholars working on the Akan language will discuss future cooperation. Prof. Dr. Dorothee Beermann (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Prof. Dr. Thomas Bearth (University of Zurich) will present the current state of various Akan language corpora and other electronic resources.
Giorgio Iemmolo will be delivering a talk on "Commonalities and peculiarities of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Romance from a typological perspective" at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Leuven on Friday, 29 November 2013, at 15.00.
Together with Netra Paudyal from the Unversity of Kiel, Robert Schikowski and Balthasar Bickel contributed an analysis of Chintang to the Valency Patterns Leipzig Online Database (ValPal). The data is available at the link below:
Together with colleagues at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Giessen, Philippe Maurer published the Atlas of Pidigin and Creole Languages. The Online Version is available at APiCS-online.info
Sabine Stoll is giving a talk entitled "Annotating and analyzing a longitudinal corpus to study the acquisition of an endangered language" at the Freiburg workshop on language documentation taking place in Freiburg i.Br. (Germany), November 22-23, 2013.
Sabine stoll is giving a guest lecture titled "Kulturspezifische Interaktionsmuster im Spracherwerb" in the international doctoral program "Hermann Paul School of Linguistics" of the universities Basel and Freiburg i.Br. The talk takes place on Tuesday, November 5, 2013, at 14.15 h. For more details follow the link below:
The UZH Board agreed to the creation of a new Department of Comparative Linguistics. The new department will include the former departments of general linguistics and Indo-European linguistics as well as the Phonetics Lab, the Psycholinguistics Lab and the Phonogram Archive. The new department will start operations on January 1, 2014.
The call for papers for a workshop on the diachronic stability of verbal morphological complexity, organized by Rik van Gijn and Fernando Zúñiga, has been posted on LinguistList. It is intended as a workshop to be held within the context of the 47th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Poznań (11-14 September). For more information, see link below:
Tanja Samardžić and Hanna Ruch move into their offices in the Institute of General Linguistics. Tanja Samardžić is the director of the newly established KorpusLab, a corpuslinguistic laboratory that is part of the University Research Priority Program (URPP) Language and Space (UFSP Sprache und Raum). Hanna Ruch begins her work as a PostDoc researcher in the URPP.
Mathias Jenny receives a 3-year project grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the project entitled “The greater Burma Zone - a transitional zone of languages and peoples”.
The article "Patterns of alignment in verb agreement" by Balthasar Bickel, Giorgio Iemmolo, Taras Zakharko, and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich has just been published by de Gruyter in the book "Languages Across Boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska", edited by Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath.
The article "Investigating the relatedness of the endangered Dogon languages" by Steven Moran and Jelena Prokić has been published in Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford Journals).
Peter Trudgill (University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway) is guest at our institute teaching a course on 'Sociolinguistic Typology' as part of the Doctoral Program Linguistics, September 25/26 and October 2/3, 2013.
Rik van Gijn will give a talk on "Meronyms in Yurakaré" at the conference "Meronyms across languages: lexicalization, semantics, morphosyntax" held in Mexico City, 27-28 September, organized by Alejandra Capistrán, Samuel Herrera, Carolyn O'Meara, and Jürgen Bohnemeyer.
Giorgio Iemmolo will give a talk on "More on the origin of direct object markers in Sinitic" co-authored with Giorgio Francesco Arcodia (University of Milano-Bicocca) at the next 8th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL8), to be held at INALCO, 26-28 September 2013 in Paris (France).
Balthasar Bickel is giving a talk titled "Beyond absolute universals" at the conference "The Cognitive Revolution 60 Years On" organized by the British Academy. The event is taking place in London September 26-27, 2013.
Two talks by members of the Department of General Linguistics will be held at the 46th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea taking place in Split, Croatia, 18-21 September 2013: Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, and Taras Zakharko: "Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on agent case marking". Rik van Gijn: "Switch reference in the upper Amazon and Andean regions".
Giorgio Iemmolo and Rik van Gijn will be co-convenors of two thematic workshops at the next SLE Annual Meeting to be held in Split, 18-21 September 2013. Giorgio has organised a workshop on the "Typology of Adposition and Case Marker Borrowing", in collaboration with Eitan Grossman (Jerusalem), Petros Karatsareas (Cambridge/Cyprus), and Stéphane Polis (Liège). Rik, together with Jeremy Hammond (MPI Nijmegen), Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and MPI Nijmegen), has organised a workshop on "Switch-reference: state of the art and where to go from here?"
Steven Moran has two papers accepted for publication and presentation at the 2nd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Representing and linking lexicons, terminologies and other language data. Collocated with GL2013 (Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon), the workshop takes place September 23 2013 in Pisa, Italy. Paper 1: "Linguistic Resources Enhanced with Geospatial Information" by Richard Littauer, Boris Villazon-Terrazas and Steven Moran. Paper 2: "Lemon-aid: using Lemon to aid quantitative historical linguistic analysis" by Steven Moran and Martin Brümmer.
Sabine Stoll is giving a talk titled "The role of complexity in the acquisition of morphology" at the international conference "From Hand to Mouth: A dialogue between spoken and signed language research" taking place in Zürich, September 5-7 2013.
Balthasar Bickel is giving a talk titled "Linguistic diversity and language ecologies" at the international conference "From Hand to Mouth: A dialogue between spoken and signed language research" taking place in Zürich, September 5-7 2013.
Mathias Jenny will give a talk on 'Transitive directionals in Mon - form, function, and implications for linguistic typology' at the 5th International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics (ICAAL 5) on September 5, 2013, at the ANU, Canberra.'
Steven Moran delivers a talk titled "Cross-linguistic comparison of complexity measures in phonological systems" together with Damian Blasi at the 'Debate on linguistic complexity' at the 44th Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM2013) on 29 August-1 September 2013.
Steven Moran is giving a talk titled "Application and evaluation of quantitative comparative methods on Dogon" at the Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (CALL) in Leiden, Netherlands on 26-28 August.
Das Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft sucht zwei studentische Assistenzen: (a) 10% studentische Assistenz: Die Aufgaben umfassen Hilfsarbeiten in verschiedenen Forschungsprojekten (Annotationen, Analysen, Recherchen), in der Lehre, der Bibliothek oder in der Seminarverwaltung, je nach Bedarf. Interessierte melden sich bitte bis 1. September 2013 per e-Mail bei Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel. (b) 20% studentische Assistenz: Mithilfe bei Content-Management und Korrektur einer Datenbank zu phonologischer Typologie. Vorkenntnisse in Phonetik und/oder Phonologie sind von Vorteil. Interessierte melden sich bis 30. September 2013 per e-Mail and Dr. Steven Moran.
Balthasar Bickel is giving a talk at the Scientifica 2013 entitled 'Das sprachliche Erbe der Menschheit in Gefahr'. The talk takes place on Sunday, September 1, at 3 - 3.45 pm, in room HG E 3 (ETH).
Scientifica 2013, the 'Zürich Days of Science', take place at ETH and UZH on August 31 and September 1. In collaboration with the Phonetics Lab, the Phonogram Archive, as well as the Lia Rumantscha, the Department of General Linguistics is present with their exhibition 'Sprachensterben – Risiken und Nebenwirkungen' ('Language death - risks and side effects'). Follow the link for more information:
Together with Johann-Mattis List, Steven Moran presents "An open source toolkit for quantitative historical linguistics" at the Association for Computational Linguistic in Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9.
At the 10th biennal Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT10) - taking place in Leipzig August 15-18, 2013 - there will be a number of talks by members of the Department of General Linguistics: Iemmolo, Giorgio and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich: "When is there agreement? Typologizing restrictions on agreement". Grossman, Eitan and Giorgio Iemmolo: "A rare case of Differential Marking on S/A: the case of Coptic". Jenny, Mathias: "Transitive directionals in Mon - form, function and implications for linguistic typology". Moran, Steven: "Typology with graphs and matrices". Moran, Steven, Taras Zakharko and Balthasar Bickel: "Estimating diachronic preferences of phonological features cross-linguistically". Weber, Tobias: "Why is ergativity often restricted to certain environments? A look at the diachrony of Differential A Marking". Abstracts can be downloaded from the link below:
Volker Dellwo, Agnes Kolmer, and Richard Wiese are hosting a workshop at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, July 21-27 2013, entitled "Word stress: dialectal variation and perception".
Tobias Weber gives a talk at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, July 21-27 2013, entitled "Language-internal variation in crosslinguistic perspective: studying patterns of interacting factors conditioning Differential Agent Marking".
Sabine Stoll, the Psycholinguistics Lab, and the Chintang project are featured in the UZH News. Follow the link for an online article on the typology of first language acquisition.
Steven Moran and Jelena Prokic are giving a talk on Friday July 19 at the Language Diversity Congress in Groningen. Their paper is entitled "Paper title: Diversity of language sources: challenges in digitization, interoperation and analysis". Additionally, Steven Moran and Damian Blasi have a poster "Obstruents and latitude: acoustic adaptation, thermal influence or spurious statistics?" at the same Congress.
On July 16, 2013, Mathias Jenny will give a talk on "Linguistic fieldwork in Myanmar - new challenges and perspectives" at Chiangmai University, Thailand.
Steven Moran and Jelena Prokic are giving a talk on Thursday July 11 in Munich at the LIPP symposium on endangered languages entitled "Digital technology and endangered Dogon languages".
The Department of General Linguistics announces the launch of a microsite on Distributional Typology. The site collects recent work on probabilistic approaches to linguistic typology done at the department. It serves as a starting point for those who want to learn more about the theoretical and methodological foundations of Distributional Typology or those who want to read up on the latest work on it in Zurich.
Katharina Haude (CNRS, Paris-Villejuif) is visiting our institute as guest researcher July 8 - 12, 2013.
Mathias Jenny, Volker Dellwo, and Rachel Weymuth's visit at Mahasarakham University in Thailand (June 11, 2013) is featured on YouTube. Follow the link below.
Talk by Sabine Stoll at the Conference "Language Documentation: Past – Present – Future" in Hannover, June 5-7, 2013: "Chintang: language acquisition".
Sabine Stoll contributed an article to the brochure "Bedrohte Sprachen. Warum die Vielfalt stirbt – und wie Forscher kulturelles Wissen vor dem Vergessen retten", a supplement to the newest issue of "Spektrum der Wissenschaft".
Volker Dellwo, Mathias Jenny, and Rachel Weymuth will hold a workshop on "Fieldwork in changing Myanmar - challenges and prospects 2013" at Mahasarakham University in Thailand on June 11, 2013.
Keynote talk by Balthasar Bickel at the Conference "Language Documentation: Past – Present – Future" in Hannover, June 5-7, 2013: "Linguistics without elicitation: new horizons emerging from corpora of endangered languages".
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich receives honourable mention to her dissertation (2010) "Typological variation in grammatical relations" on occasion of the Joseph Greenberg award for typological dissertation defended between 2009 and 2012, presented by the Association for Linguistic Typology.
On June 1st, the Departments of General Linguistics and Geography will jointly be hosting an interdisciplinary workshop on "Landscape through the prism of language", funded by the GRC of the University of Zurich. More information can be found in the link below.
On May 30 and 31 2013, the Department of General Linguistics will be hosting the third edition of the Transalpine Typology Meeting. More information can be found in the link below.
Giorgio Iemmolo and Robert Schikowski will give a talk on "Differential Object Marking and Differential Object Indexation" at the CASTL of the University of Tromsø, Norway, on May 23-24.
Taras Zakharko is giving a talk entitled "ToolboxSearch: an R package for working with Toolbox Corpora" at the workshop 'Exploring data from language documentation' organized by the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin, May 10-11 2013.
At the 23rd SEALS (Southeast Asian Linguistics Society) conference taking place in Bankok/Thailand May 29-31 2013, three members of our seminar will present a paper: - Tobias Weber "Locus of marking on the clause level in Southeast Asia: areal and genealogical patterns" - Voker Dellwo (together with Peggy Mok): "Rhythmic variability in South-East Asian languages: application of a novel method for rhythmic measurements based on syllabic amplitude peak points" - Mathias Jenny: "‘New Situation’ (NSIT) - Southeast Asian languages and aspect theory"
Mathias Jenny will give a plenary talk ath the 23rd SEALS (Southeast Asian Linguistics Society) conference taking place in Bankok/Thailand May 29-31 2013. The title of the talk is "New challenges in fieldwork in a changing Southeast Asia - languages of Myanmar".
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich has accepted a junior professorship in General Linguistics from the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. She will start her new appointment on May 1 2013.
Bill Foley (University of Sydney) is giving a talk entitled "Direct-inverse systems in Murik-Kopar: role alignment, person hierarchies and paradigm collapse". The talk is part of the 'Projektkolloquium' and will take place on Friday, April 26, at 10:15 am in room KOL-H-309 (University main building).
Greville Corbett (University of Surrey), guest of the doctoral program linguistics, is giving a talk entitled "Paradigms: interesting, complex and difficult to represent". It will take place on Tuesday, April 23, at 17:15 h in room HIM-E-4.
Dr. Katharina Haude (CNRS/SeDyL, Villejuif) is giving a talk entitled "Animacy and inverse voice in Movima: a corpus study". The talk is part of the 'Projektkolloquium' and will take place on Friday, April 19, at 10:15 am in room KOL-H-309 (University main building).
Balthasar Bickel will give two talks at the Charles University in Prague, April 15-17 2013, entitled (1) Distributional Typology: a probabilistic approach to linguistic universals and areal diffusion and (2) Government vs. agreement in typological perspective.
Sabine Stoll will give two talks at the Charles University in Prague, April 15-17 2013, entitled (1) Comparative language acquisition research: some new methods and (2) Learning argument structure with strong variation: item-specificity and conversational interaction.
Taras Zakharko will be teaching the course "Introduction to R and Quantitative Analysis of Language Documentation Data" at the workshop on Current Tendencies and Potentials in Language Documentation. In addition, he will present a talk titled "Corpus-based typology of clause linkage: a language-independent annotation schema of linguistic predication". The workshop will take place at the UNICAMP (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) in Campinas, Brazil, April 2-5, 2013.
As of now you can find a summarized inventory of the department's linguistic journals in conjunction with the inventories of the Central Library of Zürich (ZB) and the Electronic Journal Library (EZB) of the University of Zürich in a synopsison the department library's homepage. Journals which are available online have a direct link to the publisher's website.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung interviewed Volker Dellwo on voice imitation and speaker recognition and published an article March 24 2013.
The iPhone application "Dialäkt Äpp" by Mary-José Kolly and Adrian Leemann was released on Friday, March 22 2013. It can be downloaded for free on iTunes. It has been covered by the media several times already, as for example in 20 Minuten. See also the UZH press release.
Am Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft wird ab sofort bzw. zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt 1 studentische Assistenz (zwischen 20-40%, ggf auch in unterschiedlichem Umfang in Semester und in den Semesterferien) angeboten. Die Aufgabe besteht in der morphologischen und syntaktischen Glossierung bzw. Annotation unseres Korpus des Chintang (Sinotibetisch: Kiranti; Nepal). Voraussetzungen: (a) gute Kenntnisse in morphologischen und syntaktischen Analysemethoden (b) Bereitschaft, sich (unter Anleitung) in eine fremde Sprache einzuarbeiten (c) technische Grundkenntnisse im Bereich Texteditoren, idealerweise Vertrautheit mit dem Programm ‘Toolbox’ oder ‘Shoebox’. Interessenten melden sich bitte bis 13. März per e-mail bei Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel [balthasar.bickel AT spw.uzh.ch]
Ingrid Hove joins the General Linguistics Department as a post-doc research associate in Adrian Leemann's SNSF project 'Swiss VoiceApp - Your voice. Your identity.'
Giorgio Iemmolo and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, in collaboration with Curdin Derungs and Flurina Wartmann from the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich, received a Graduate Campus Grant (GRC) for a workshop on "Landscape through the prism of language", to be held in Zurich on June 1st.
In cooperation with Jeremy Hammond (MPI Nijmegen) and Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf and MPI Nijmegen), Rik van Gijn will organize a workshop entitled “Switch reference: state of the art and where to go from here?” at the next meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Split, to be held 18-21 September 2013.
Balthasar Bickel has joined the editorial board of the newly established "Journal of Linguistic Geography", published by Cambridge University Press.
Steven Moran is co-author on a paper being presented at "CUNY Conference on the Feature in Phonology and Phonetics", January 16-18, 2013, at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, titled "Revisiting ‘The Role of Features in Phonological Inventories’". Abstract
"Revisiting population size vs. phoneme inventory size" by Steven Moran, Daniel McCloy, and Richard Wright has been published in 'Language', Volume 88, Number 4, December 2012, pp. 877-893.
