Learner affect (attitudes, emotions, motivation, etc.) is a critical factor in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Although affect is generally acknowledged to be dynamic and influenced by pedagogical practice, much research takes a dualist approach in which attitudes toward the learning experience are forged within the classroom, whereas attitudes toward the target community are formed beyond the classroom walls, through contact or exposure to the media, for example. However, during research conducted for my master’s thesis, I found that subtle differences in the way the target community is represented in learning materials can have a direct and measurable impact on learner affect. I also found evidence that attitude toward the target language itself is a heterogeneous construct, raising important theoretical questions. 

The presentation will outline the three main goals of my current doctoral research. First, it aims to design and validate an instrument suitable for measuring changes in learner affect; second, it seeks to establish a theoretical model of attitudes towards the target language as a multidimensional construct; and third, it will expand and deepen the findings from my master’s thesis through a longitudinal research design examining how affective changes evolve over time, and how they relate to learning outcomes.

 

In this talk, I will discuss data from language mixing involving Greek in contact with English and German. I will show how the specific patterns we find provide support for a particular theory of morphology, namely one that rejects the idea that linguistic competence includes a lexicon as a repository of words collected with semantic and morphosyntactic properties. In particular, it will be shown that multilingual speakers combine abstract units (roots) with functional morphemes and they have more than one realization possibility at their disposal for these building blocks.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Artemis Alexiadou is Director of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) and she holds an S-Professorship for "General Linguistics" at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU).

At Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin she is head of the research group Experimental Syntax and Heritage Languages, funded by the Leibniz Prize 2014 (DFG). Artemis Alexiadou conducts research in particular on the theory of syntax and morphology, on cross-linguistic variation and on so-called heritage languages.

In this presentation, I discuss whether zone-based models of the English noun phrase adequately account for the complexity of nominal modification. Drawing on model theory, I begin by distinguishing the ontological and epistemic dimensions of linguistic modelling and argue that empirical fitness provides the only viable basis for evaluation. A detailed examination of reference, referent, and interpersonal modifiers shows that zone-based models oversimplify highly heterogeneous semantic and pragmatic functions, fail to capture essential scope relations, and do not accommodate the positional flexibility observed in corpus data. Furthermore, I argue that a comprehensive model of noun phrase modification must include the postnominal position. Incorporating postnominal modification, however, further reveals that other factors, alongside semantics and function, influence modifier position. The paper concludes that accounting for the dynamics of modifier ordering requires a more flexible representation of the noun phrase

Hungarian finite verbs can cross-reference their direct object's number in addition to the subject's person and number. In the literature on this phenomenon, it is sometimes proposed that some of the verbal object markers are clitics and some are agreement markers. In this talk, I will argue that all verbal object markers are in fact agreement markers. I will base this argument on morphological, semantic, and syntactic arguments from older and more recent literature and show that Hungarian object agreement markers behave differently with respect to these diagnostics than clitics in Bulgarian or Amharic, among others.

While sociolinguists tend to look for explanations of linguistic change primarily in socio-cultural factors, including language contact, more structurally-oriented linguists frequently identify language-internal causes to the neglect of the socio-cultural situation. 

To investigate the agreement system of Arabic varieties, which have been in long-term close contact with Persian, we take a multi-causality approach to linguistic change. Observations like the following raise the hypothesis that number agreement is converging towards the Persian system and that the lack of gender in Persian also has an impact on gender agreement with singular nouns in South-Iranian Arabic.

‘The community has grown and so has the number of houses.’

‘And my mother wouldn’t let me, she started crying.’ 

I present the results of two studies (on number and gender agreement) that shed light on the interaction of various social, structural and semantic-pragmatic factors. The paper briefly reports the results for number agreement and focusses on the discussion of gender from a sociolinguistic, language-internal and typological perspective. The combined interpretation of the two outcomes suggests that semantic properties like animacy and individuation are the primary factors that license restructuring of the Arabic agreement system by replicating Persian syntactic patterns. At the same time, the results allow us to trace the trajectory of change along the intensity of bilingualism and identify the leaders of the change.

Keywords: language change, language contact, agreement, number, gender, Arabic, Persian

Linguistics that is not grounded in empirical data risks becoming detached from the lived reality of speakers and the world, producing abstract constructs with limited relevance beyond academia. 

At the same time, a focus on actual language entails a strong reliance on linguistic material collected during fieldwork – under conditions that are far from neutral. Once transcribed, processed, and incorporated into manuscripts and publications, such materials form the basis of knowledge production and are repeatedly cited in subsequent linguistic research. This raises critical questions about the fragility, bias, and epistemological limitations underpinning a discipline often understood as “objective”. 

The paper addresses these issues through a case study of the Austrian Linguist Walter Pichl. His legacy comprises numerous unpublished manuscripts held at the University of Vienna and in private collections, as well as hundreds of recordings archived a the Phonogrammarchiv, produced during fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily in Senegal and Sierra Leone. Together, these materials constitute a substantial yet underexplored archive – a linguistic treasure. 

The paper examines the relevance of revisiting and critically reassessing this corpus for contemporary linguistics, particularly in the areas of language documentation and description, language contact and endangerment, disciplinary history, archiving practices, and methodology. Special attention is given to the „Cangin”-group in Senegal and the Bullom languages of Sierra Leone, including (nearly) extinct varieties such as Bom and Kim, and threatened languages like Palor. 

Engaging with such archival materials also requires confronting the colonial conditions under which they were produced. Linguistic data of this kind were often extracted within asymmetrical power relations that continue to shape the discipline today. Any scholarly engagement must therefore critically reflect on these colonial legacies and continuities, including their entanglement with racist structures and ongoing epistemic inequalities. Consequently, this discussion invites a broader reconsideration of what linguistics is today – its scope, its responsibilities, and its boundaries – situated within the local academic context in Graz.

Grammars of English often posit confusing and contradictory analyses of seemingly simple constructions like the following:

(1)       I like those books/I like those.

(2)       the rich, the French, the Dutch

(3)       I liked what I saw.

In (i) the word those is analysed either as belonging to a single word class (typically ‘pronoun’), or to different word classes (‘determinative’ and ‘pronoun’). In (ii) words like poor, French and Dutch are classed as adjectives or as nouns, or perhaps as (partially) converted nouns. In (iii) the italicised string is often analysed as a clause (a ‘free relative clause’ or ‘nominal relative clause’) or as a noun phrase, or as both. 

In my talk I will discuss a number of approaches to these syntactic puzzles. In particular, I will look at the treatment offered in Huddleston and Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL). To deal with these structures, CGEL posits the existence of a number of ‘fused constructions’, such that in (i) in both cases the word those belongs to the word class of determinative, which functions as a determiner when a noun follows, or as a ‘fused determiner-head’ when it occurs on its own. In the second example the underlined words are adjectives which function as ‘fused modifier-heads’ inside noun phrases, and in the third example the italicised string is a noun phrase which instantiates a ‘fused relative construction’.

I will signal a number of problems for the account in CGEL which will lead me to challenge the idea that we need to appeal to the notion of ‘fusion’ to analyse these constructions syntactically. Specifically, I will argue that introducing the notion of syntactic fusion into the grammar poses conceptual problems, and comes at a ‘cost’, because a new notion of fusion needs to be added to the store of grammatical terminology. I will contend that we can analyse these constructions by returning to the simpler analysis of positing zero heads instead.

Reference

Huddleston, R. and G.K. Pullum (2002) The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A Case Study of micro- and mini-

Diminutives are known for expressing a wide range of meanings, corresponding both to a quantitative (size) and a qualitative (affectivity) assessment of the base, and carrying a more or less strong pragmatic value. Romance languages display complex evaluative systems in which these dimensions are often intertwined. However, the semantics of diminutives has mostly been investigated with respect to suffixation. Our study aims to address this gap by examining the semantics of the two Spanish prefixes micro- and mini-. Drawing on data from the Observatori de Neologia, we investigate the semantic behavior of these two elements to assess to which extent they convey descriptive versus evaluative meanings. In particular, we propose to place diminutive constructions along an evaluativeness scale: while micro- is descriptive and evaluatively neutral, and suffixes such as -ito/a display a strong evaluative value, mini- occupies an intermediate position, functioning either as purely descriptive or as both descriptive and evaluative. We then discuss factors underlying this scale.

In this talk I will offer another piece of empirical evidence showing that the still quite common assumption that the diachronic processes of grammaticalization and subjectification necessarily go hand in hand cannot be maintained. The casus belli are four modal verbs in Dutch: kunnen ‘can’, mogen ‘may’, moeten ‘must’, and hoeven ‘need’. In the last few hundred years these auxiliaries have shown a distinct tendency to regain autonomy, and to get used as main verbs again. Still, they are continuing on their semantic subjectification path (i.e. there is no return to ‘objective’ meanings, not even in the new autonomous uses). I will offer an explanation for these developments, which at once illustrates why highly subjective meanings (e.g. epistemic modality or inferentiality) do not necessarily ‘like’ a highly grammatical status. 

This talk reviews some of the principal patterns of synchronic morphosyntactic variation in the clausal domain across Romance in support of a north-south Romance continuum from an approach which locates the relevant dimensions of microvariation between northern and southern varieties in the properties of individual functional heads (Ledgeway 2016; 2020; 2022). This approach, which builds on the insights of the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture (cf. Baker 2008:353), assumes that the locus of parametric variation lies in the lexicon and, in particular, the (PF‑)lexicalization of specific formal feature values of individual functional heads (Borer 1984; Chomsky 1995). These feature values are not set in isolation, inasmuch as parameters ostensibly form an interrelated network of implicational relationships: the given value of a particular parameter may, in turn, entail the concomitant activation of associated lower-order parametric choices, whose potential surface effects may consequently become entirely predictable, or indeed render entirely irrelevant other parameters (cf. Roberts 2019). Through an examination of a selection of examples of major morphosyntactic variation between northern and southern Romance varieties, I shall show how these differences can ultimately be traced back to the activation or otherwise of the clausal functional heads T and v and the differential, and often complementary, composition of the features they carry, as witnessed most notably in the variable position of the finite verb across Romance, the so-called V(erb)-movement parameter.

The so-called ‘supplementive clauses’ (Quirk et al. 1985) are characterised by various aspects whose description is not uniformly clarified in English or possibly in other languages, as these are constructions that also occur in other languages. There is no certainty about what determines lexical selection, semantic conditioning

(categorisation) and, in some cases, their difference from structures that can be assigned to the environment of the nominal expression as modifiers in apposition (albeit in a shifted position). This presentation introduces data and hypotheses in this sense in order to locate these constructions not only in relation to constructions of an exclusively or mainly adverbial nature, but also in the area of the noun phrase.

The main criteria for passivisability typically represent transitivity (Zifonun et al. 1997), unaccusativity (Abraham 2011, Grewendorf 1989) and, as regards semantic conditions, the agenthood of the subject (Eisenberg 2013). However, evidence from German corpora show that none of the conditions provided in the given literature are consistent. Against this background, the question arises which conditions have to be fulfilled for a verb to passivize, focusing on the German passive construction werden + past participle. 

To address this question, a sample of verbs has been created, comprised of verbs that are claimed to lack a passive variant or are deemed borderline cases. In a corpus-based study, the verbs are analysed in regards their aspectual features and semantic roles in order to uncover possible correlations of both formal and semantic features with passivisability. 

First, the analysis shows that not agency, but rather a constitutive feature of agenthood, namely control (Tomasello et al. 2005; Leslie 1996), forms the primary condition for passivisability. Second, passivisability is not determined by a single condition, but rather by a set of conditions comprising both verb-semantic features and properties of argument structure. 

References

Abraham, Werner (2011): Verbs of motion. Impersonal passivization between unaccusativity and unergativity. In: Andrej L. Malchukov und Anna Siewierska (ed.): Impersonal constructions. A cross-linguistic perspective (Studies in language companion series, 124). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 91–125.

Eisenberg, Peter (⁴2013): Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik. Band 2. Der Satz. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.

Grewendorf, Günther (1989): Ergativity in German (Studies in Generative Grammar, 35). Dodrecht: Foris.

Leslie, Alan M. (1996): A theory of agency. In: Dan Sperber et al. (Hrsg.), Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. 121 – 149.

Primus, Beatrice (2011): Animacy and Telicity. Semantic Constraints on impersonal passives. In: Lingua 121. 80 – 99

Tomasello, Michael & Malinda Carpenter & Josep Call & Tanya Behne & Henrike Mollet (2005): Understanding and sharing intentions: the origins of cultural cognition. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28. 675 – 691.

Zifonun, Gisela, Ludger Hoffmann & Bruno Strecker (1997): Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. 3 Bde. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 

It is a standard view defended in the literature that interlocutors should in some sense be ready to accept the other’s position if they provide compelling arguments for their position (Habermas, Cohen, and others). I argue that this result follows from a QUD-theory of discourse structure and organization in the sense that a QUD that constitutes a discourse goal must be an open question. Discussing a closed question is an ill-defined discourse goal. In the talk I motivate the argument from the perspective of formal pragmatics, I discuss apparent counter-examples and discuss the problems posed by violating this condition. Specifically, today’s public and political discourse plays out in institutional setups that make it particularly easy to not observe this condition, thus creating settings of simulated discourse where the structural prerequisites of inquiry are absent. 

Negative polarity items (NPIs) are words or, even more often, multiword expressions which require a negative context for their felicitous use. In (1) and (2), we see the NPIs "to give a hoot" and "ever" in two potential licensing contexts ("nobody", "few + N"). We notice that "ever" is acceptable in both, but "to give a hoot" is only acceptable in the former.

1a) Nobody gave a hoot.

  b)*Few athletes gave a hoot.

2a) Nobody ever saw the yeti.

  b) Few people ever saw the yeti.

There have been numerous theories of NPIs ever since Klima (1964) characterized their distributional environment as marked by a syntactic feature that he called "affective". Analyses have been cast in various syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic frameworks, and their combinations. Yet other theories view NPIs as an exotic specimen of collocational signs, lexical or phrasal units which require the presence of a negation-like meaning component, be it semantic or pragmatic.

With a very small number of exceptions, what NPI studies to date have in common is that they are based on a very small set of NPIs, typically those involving the morpheme "any" or its counterparts in other languages. In effect, far-reaching theoretical decisions are made that take their justification from extremely subtle introspective judgments about very few examples of NPIs and NPI licensing environments.

After a quick overview of the theoretical landscape and the known distribution of NPIs, I will report on ongoing work by our research group in Frankfurt to ground NPI research in a better understanding of its empirical base. Topics include challenges of identifying new NPIs, methods of data collection, and the design and implementation of an openly accessible cross-linguistic database. We will see what kind of data is useful in such a collection, how to structure it, and how the emerging collection can be queried.

Our project languages are German, Romanian, and English, but in this presentation, I will focus primarily on German.

Humans conceptualise and use feelings for cultural maintenance, deploying language to label them.  Humans vary in how they cognize, label, and describe feelings. Cross-linguistically, conventional descriptions of feelings make explicit reference to the body. However, there is variation in how people talk about feelings with somatic referents, giving rise to various lingua-cultural ethno-theories. Drawing on variations in the form and meaning of “feelings-in-the-body” talk, I argue that different organizing principles are employed in categorizing feelings.  WEIRD groups segregate and categorize feelings into “emotions”, “sensations”, “intuition” and “cognition”. Others integrate all bodily and cognitively based feelings into one category. Some linguacultures lack labels for the domain. Through a conceptual semantic analysis of “feelings talk” involving the “heart” cross-linguistically, I show that such talk involves different semiotic projections of the body which are not just metaphorical figurations. 

Keywords: feelings in the heart, conventional body images, encoding idioms, emotion ethnotheories, cultural semantics, grammatical semantics

Mast. filol. Branislava Ciganovic (Institut für Slawistik): Discontinuous NP and discourse organization: evidence from Slavic Serbian

This research explores morphosyntactic and pragmatic properties of discontinuous noun phrases (DNP) in Slavic Serbian, particularly their effects in discourse. DNPs have been discussed in the literature, mostly in terms of their morphosyntactic licensing conditions, where the motivation for their licensing was found in information-structural notions (IS), particularly focus marking. In other words, DNPs are motivated by the need to mark one or the other part of a DNP for (contrastive/narrow) focus, and are felicitous only in contexts where the need for focus marking arises (aside from Schultze-Berndt (2022) who argues that DNPs are tools for obtaining thetic sentences). To tease out IS and pragmatic properties of DNPs, we have conducted a corpus study of 'Kratka vsemirna istorija od Georgija Magaraševića, profesora' (1831) (A Short History of the World by Georgije Magarašević, Professor (1831)), because Slavic Serbian employs DNPs more than spoken contemporary Serbian; and because the properties of DNPs can be investigated in a larger discourse context. We first highlight their morphosyntactic properties and then examine what motivates their uses at specific points of discourse development. While it is true that DNPs easily render themselves for (contrastive) focus interpretations, as most word order rearrangements do, the question is whether they are exclusively interpreted as being ‘focus marked’. We argue that (contrastive) focus assumed to be responsible for the licensing of DNPs does not serve to (only) evoke alternatives for the expression in focus, since in many cases no obvious alternatives are present. The crucial licensing factor is the notion of unexpectedness. We propose that DNPs appear in order to drive narrative discourse development, where the strict division in terms of IS is often absent, and DNPs serve to indicate the discourse status of discourse participants, thereby marking them as - discourse topic introduction, reintroduction and discourse switch from one discourse segment to another one.  

Keywords: discontinuous noun phrase, focus, information structure, discourse organization, morphosyntax, pragmatics

MA Daphne Reitinger-Zemann (Treffpunkt Sprachen, Plurilingualismus und Fachdidaktik): Second language mastery in multilingual adults: social and cognitive factors

Recent years have shown a rise in research evidence demonstrating native-like L2 attainment in adult learners (e.g. Kinsella and Singleton 2014; Dörnyei and Mentzelopoulos 2023). Studies report on social-experiential factors, such as prolonged immersion into the L2 environment, whose effects prove to be better predictors of ultimate attainment than the effects of age at the time of first exposure to the L2 (e.g. Marinova-Todd 2003). One individual variable that empirical research has repeatedly pointed out to be strongly predictive of high levels of L2-learning outcomes is the learner’s individual motivation to achieve a high level of competence in the L2 (Marinova-Todd 2003; Wen et al. 2017). In addition, a number of researchers have previously addressed musical perception skills as a cognitive factor that correlates with phonological aspects of second language acquisition (e.g. Chobert and Besson 2013; Li et al. 2024). The overall connection of musicality and speech is supported by neuroscientific research, which shows that the processing of music and speech partially occurs in overlapping brain areas (Patel 2014; Peretz et al. 2015). A link between beneficial effects of musicality on perceptual aspects of L2 acquisition has been convincingly established. The connection between musicality and L2 speech production, however, is yet debated. This presentation aims to discuss the theoretical background and methodology of my PHD project, within which I seek to investigate the correlation of social factors (motivation to achieve a high level of L2 competence) and cognitive factors (musical perception skills) with high levels of L2 attainment in adult learners.

References

Chobert, Julie; Besson, Mireille (2013): Musical expertise and second language learning. In Brain sciences 3 (2), pp. 923–940. DOI: 10.3390/brainsci3020923.

Dörnyei, Zoltán; Mentzelopoulos, Katarina (2023): Lessons from Exceptional Language Learners Who Have Achieved Nativelike Proficiency. Motivation, Cognition and Identity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Kinsella, Ciara; Singleton, David (2014): Much More Than Age. In Applied Linguistics 35 (4), pp. 441–462. DOI: 10.1093/applin/amu032.

Li, Peng; Zhang, Yuan; Baills, Florence; Prieto, Pilar (2024): Musical perception skills predict speech imitation skills: differences between speakers of tone and intonation languages. In Lang. cogn. 16 (3), pp. 647–665. DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2023.52.

Marinova-Todd, Stefka H. (2003): Comprehensive Analysis of Ultimate Attainment in Adult Second Language Acquisition. PhD: Harvard University.

Patel, Aniruddh D. (2014): Can nonlinguistic musical training change the way the brain processes speech? The expanded OPERA hypothesis. In Hearing research 308, pp. 98–108. DOI: 10.1016/j.heares.2013.08.011.

Peretz, Isabelle; Vuvan, Dominique; Lagrois, Marie-Élaine; Armony, Jorge L. (2015): Neural overlap in processing music and speech. In Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 370 (1664), p. 20140090. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0090.

Wen, Zhisheng; Biedroń, Adriana; Skehan, Peter (2017): Foreign language aptitude theory: Yesterday, today and tomorrow. In Lang. Teach. 50 (1), pp. 1–31. DOI: 10.1017/S0261444816000276.

PhD student Joeri Vinke (Institut für Sprachwissenschaft): Modelling Intensifiers and Reflexives

Within morphosyntactic approaches to reflexive anaphors it has often been noted that there is a special relationship between reflexive pronouns and intensifiers (Zribi-Hertz, 1995 et seq, König & Siemund, 2000 et seq. among others). Most theories of (anaphor) binding in generative grammar take a naïve view at best of the intensifier-anaphor alternation if they account for it at all (e.g. Reuland, 2011; Hicks 2009).
In recent years, however, Charnavel and Sportiche (2016 et seq.) have developed an analysis that accounts for the intensifier-anaphor alternation by assuming that both elements (i.e. the anaphor and its antecedent on the one, as the intensifier and what it modifies on the other hand) arise together in a separate (nominal) predicational structure.
This presentation will scrutinize this view and show that it both over-generates and under-generates. As a way out I will argue that instead of as an out of-the-blue predicational head we need to analyze both reflexivity and intensification as part of the nominal spine. Such an analysis faces problems of its own, but in an opportunistic spot: places where we encounter language-variation. Finally, it allows for a greater reduction of doubling-phenomena, by aligning with the “big-DP”-analysis of clitic doubling (Uriagareka, 1995).
 

References
Charnavel, I., and Sportiche D. (2016). “Anaphor Binding: What French Inanimate Anaphors Show.” Linguistic Inquiry 47 (1): 35–87.
Hicks, G. (2009). The Derivation of Anaphoric Relations. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
König, E. and Siemund, P. (2000). Intensifiers and Reflexives: A Typological Perspective. In Reflexives: Forms and Functions (Z. Frajzyngier and T. Curl eds.), pp. 41-74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reuland, E. (2011) Anaphora and Language Design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Uriagereka, Juan. 1995. Aspects of the syntax of clitic placement in Western Romance. Linguistic Inquiry 26:79–124.
Zribi-Hertz, A. (1995) "Emphatic or Reflexive? On the Endophoric Character of French lui-même and Similar Complex Pronouns". Journal of Linguistics 31: 331-374.

PhD student Viktor Varró (Institut für Sprachwissenschaft): Language in Video Games as L2 Input: A Corpus-Based Profile 

"In this talk I report on the corpus construction and initial analysis phase of my PhD project, which investigates three specific video games as sources of English input for adolescent L2 learners. Rather than starting from learner outcomes, the project first asks what kind of vocabulary and grammar these games actually expose players to.

I briefly introduce three text-rich titles from different genres and show how their in-game dialogue was turned into comparable corpora. On this basis, I outline emerging patterns in their lexical profile and in recurrent grammatical constructions, and explain the methods used to obtain these preliminary descriptions.

Finally, I sketch how these input profiles will serve as a baseline for later stages of the project, where I collect learner data and ask whether regular gaming leaves detectable traces in teenagers’ English grammar."


 

Adverbs seem to escape any rigid definition. Although they are traditionally considered to form an uninflected class, research has revealed their complex and multifaceted nature. In fact, the adverbial functions can be realised by lexicalised adverbs or by elements morphologically marked via a suffix (e.g., -ly adverbs and -mente adverbs), as well as nouns, adjectives and prepositional phrases (see Hummel 2024 on the different morphosyntactic realisations of adverbs in Romance; Maienborn & Schäfer 2011 on adverbs in general and their semantic classification; Delfitto 2006 on issues related to adverbial classes and the mapping between their syntactic and semantic categories). The Neapolitan adverbial system is no less complex. This presentation aims to examine the morphosyntactic adverbial types available in Neapolitan, with a particular focus on prepositional adverb(ial)s, such as ‘e pressa (‘in a hurry’), accapace (‘perhaps’), a ssulo (‘privately’), a ll’urdemo (‘finally’), etc. Both diachronic and synchronic data are provided. They are mainly taken from Ledgeway (2009, ch. 20) and the 14th-century work Ricordi by Loise de Rosa (edited by V. Formentin). These morphosyntactic variants are the subject of my ongoing empirical study as part of my doctoral project.

References

Delfitto, D. (2006). Adverb classes and adverb placement. The Blackwell companion to syntax, 83-120. 

de Rosa, L. (1998). Ricordi. Formentin, V., ed., Vol. 2, Roma: Salerno Editore.

Hummel, M. (2024). Adverbs. In A. M. De Cesare, & G. Salvi, Manual of Romance word classes,401­429. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter.

Ledgeway, A. (2009). Capitolo 20: Avverbi. In Grammatica diacronica del napoletano. Vol. 350, 717-739. Walter de Gruyter.

Maienborn, C., & Schäfer, M. (2011). Adverbials and adverbs. Semantics. An international handbook of natural language meaning, 2, 1390-1420.

This talk discusses the discourse effects of the final rise in declarative sentences, specifically focusing on the distinction and potential unification of inquisitive rising declaratives (RDs) and assertive RDs. Traditional approaches view the final pitch rise primarily as signalling a biased question (inquisitive RDs), where the speaker is uncommitted to the uttered proposition and inquires its truth. However, this view completely disregards assertive RDs, where the speaker is committed to the proposition, yet a strong sense of openness remains.

Challenging the assumption that these are separate linguistic entities, I propose that all final falls signal a particular notion of discourse closure, while all final rises signal incompleteness or openness concerning at least one in a set of possible discourse issues. Assertive RDs introduce implicit questions by targeting a variety of issues, such as speech act justification or contextual relevance. To address the resulting ambiguity, I explore the idea that the steepness of the final rise correlates with whether the signaled open issue is primarily forward- or backward-looking in the discourse. 

Ecolinguistics has developed as an approach to language studies over the past fifty years. Since its beginnings in the 1970s (Haugen 1972) it has applied the ecology metaphor to language in various ways to study the interaction between language and its environment. 

This paper will briefly trace the history of ecolinguistics and will then discuss its recent developments (Penz and Fill 2022; Fill and Penz 2018). The field has been characterized by heterogeneity since its very beginning, and various researchers have oscillated between attempts to unify it and recognize its diversity. Attempts to unify the diverse approaches have identified two and four different ways, respectively, in which the relationship between language and ecology is conceptualized. The latter categorization is based on a symbolic ecology, a natural ecology, a sociocultural ecology, and a cognitive ecology (Steffensen and Fill 2014). With the publication of the book Ecolinguistics. The stories we live by, Stibbe (2015) has tried to consolidate the field by taking a purely discourse analytic turn, yet the other areas are still present. In terms of theorizing, methods of sociolinguistics, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics have been resorted to, yet a recent endeavour aims to develop a unifying ecolinguistic theory by conceptualizing language itself as ecological (Steffensen et al. 2024). 

References

Fill, Alwin F. & Hermine Penz (eds.) 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. London/New York: Routledge. 

Haugen, Einar. 1972. The ecology of language. In Anwar S. Dil (ed.), The ecology of language: Essays by Einar Haugen, 325–339. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (reprinted in Fill and Mühlhäusler, eds. 2001, 57-66). 

Penz, Hermine & Alwin Fill. 2022. Ecolinguistics: History, today, and tomorrow. Journal of World Languages 8(2). 232–253; aop. 

Steffensen, Sune V., Döring, Martin & Stephen C. Cowley (eds.)  2024. Language as an ecological phenomenon. Languaging and bioecologies in human-environment relationships. London, etc.: Bloomsbury.

Stibbe, Arran. 2015. Ecolinguistics.Language, ecology and the stories we live by. London: Bloomsbury. 

This talk presents new insights on the interaction between counterfactual morphology and the interpretation of necessity and desire modals. The starting point is a puzzle presented by von Fintel & Iatridou (2008; 2023) that in some languages: (i) CF morphology ("X-marking") is used to turn a strong necessity modal into a weak necessity one, and want into wish; (ii) in addition, X-marked modals are ambiguous: the CF-marked modal claim can be evaluated in the actual world or in a CF world (endo vs exo readings). 

In this talk I show that Bulgarian has two morphologically distinct X-markers: weak CF (X') and strong CF (X''), thanks to which all readings identified by von Fintel & Iatridou (2023) are morphosemantically disambiguated. The pattern that emerges is that the choice between X' and X'' marking on modals correlates with CF strength in their interpretations. This informs the nature of the relationship between X-morphology and modals in new ways and relates to recent works that identify a richer morphological inventory for CF marking, e.g. in Portuguese (Ferreira, 2023), Japanese (Mizuno, 2024), Serbian (Kaufmannn & Todorovic, 2024), and Palestinian Arabic and Hebrew (Karawani, 2014).

The term Parasitic Scope (Barker 2007) describes a class of representations in which a scope taking node α is squeezed inbetween another node β and β’s nuclear scope. (1) exemplifies the constellation schematically in a transparent LF model (von Stechow 1993; Heim & Kratzer 1998). Assume that α ranges over denotations that combine with binary individual relations. Then, exportation of β and abstraction over ist trace as in (1)b provides the context for movement of α inbetween β and the λ-binder of β, generating the Parasitic Scope signature (Sternefeld 1998; Nissenbaum 1998; Beck & Sauerland 2000; Bhatt & Takahashi 2011; Kennedy 2009; Lechner 2012, i.a.):

formula

I will argue that fundamental conditions on Parasitic Scope formation are structural in nature and
fall out from two simple principles of natural language syntax: Locality and The Strict Cycle.
This perspective makes it possible to envision a common analysis for such superficially distinct
phenomena as reflexivization (Condition A of Binding Theory) and restrictions on phrasal
comparatives (Lechner 1997; Pancheva 2006, 2009). The analysis will be shown to extend to
relative readings of superlatives, strengthening the idea that Parasitic Scope formation is subject
to formal restrictions.

References
Barker, Chris. 2007. Parasitic Scope. Linguistics and Philosophy 30. 3: 407-444.

Beck, Sigrid and Sauerland, Uli. 2000. Cumulativity is needed: A reply to Winter (2000). Natural

Language Semantics 8: 349-371.

Bhatt, Rajesh and Shoichi Takahashi. 2011. Reduced and unreduced phrasal comparatives. Natural

Language & Linguistic Theory, (29): 581-620.

Kennedy, Chris. 2009. Modes of Comparison. In: Proceedings of CLS 43: 141-165.

Lechner, Winfried. 1997. Some Remarks on Phrasal Comparatives. International Syntax Roundtable,

Ypps, Danube. http://users.uoa.gr/~wlechner/Ypps.pdf

Lechner, Winfried. 2012. Towards a theory of transparent reflexivization. Ms.,

http://users.uoa.gr/~wlechner/Reflexivization%202012.pdf

Nissenbaum, Jon. 1998. Movement and Derived Predicates: Evidence from Parasitic Gaps. MIT Working

Papers in Linguistics: The Interpretive Tract.

Pancheva, Roumyana. 2006. Phrasal and clausal comparatives in Slavic. In: Formal Approaches to Slavic

Linguistics 14: The Princeton Meeting, (eds.) J. Lavine, S. Franks, M. Tasseva-Kurktchieva and

H. Filip. 236-257

Pancheva, Roumyana. 2009. More Students Attended FASL than CONSOLE. In: Formal Approaches

to Slavic Linguistics 18: The Cornell Meeting, 2009, (eds.) W. Browne, A. Cooper, A. Fisher,

E. Kesici, N. Predolac, D. Zec. 383-400. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.

Sternefeld, Wolfgang. 1998. Reciprocity and Cumulative Predication. Natural Language Semantics 6:

303-337.

In this presentation, I examine the phonological reflexes of Middle High German (mhd.) ê, ô, and œ, which are key markers for distinguishing between South Bavarian (Südbairisch) and Central Bavarian (Mittelbairisch) dialects in Austria. Recent studies (e.g., Ernst 2004; Binder 2025; Fanta-Jende 2025) have identified significant processes of language change, resulting in up to four competing variants (e.g., Central Bavarian /ʃeːn/, South Bavarian /ʃɪɐ̯n/, “Styrian” /ʃɛɪ̯n/, and Standard German /ʃøːn/ for schön ‘beautiful, pretty’). These changes are influenced by both linguistic factors, such as lexical diffusion, and extralinguistic factors, including region, generation, and intra-individual variation.

To analyze these ongoing processes of dialect restructuring and language change in southeastern Austria, this study draws on both contemporary and historical data. The contemporary data, collected as part of the SFB project German in Austria. Variation – Contact – Perception, captures speakers’ speech repertoires across diverse situational contexts, including formal and informal conversations, translation tasks, and reading tasks. The historical data is sourced from the Dialect Cultures project, which comprises a corpus of dialectal manuscripts and printed texts (e.g., satirical poems, wedding songs, comedies) from the 17th and 18th centuries. By comparing these corpora, the study aims to provide deeper insights into the linguistic dynamics of this intriguing region. 

A further goal of the presentation is to foster collaboration among the philological institutes working on variation and language contact in southeastern Austria and its neighboring regions.

References:

Binder, Barbara. 2025. Phonetisch-phonologische Variation der steigenden Diphthonge im südmittelbairischen Übergangsgebiet: Phonetisch-phonologische Analysen zur areal-horizontalen und vertikal-sozialen Variationsdimension. Vienna: Master Thesis.

Dialect Cultures = Neuhuber, Christian. Datenbank bairisch-österreichischer Mundartkunst vor 1800. http://gams.uni-graz.at/context:dic (24 October, 2025).

Ernst, Peter. 2004. Dialektsoziologische Grenzräume in der Oststeiermark. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik (ZDL) 71(1). 3–22.

Fanta-Jende, Johanna. 2025. How to model and capture dialect-standard repertoires? Global-correlative results from Southern Austria. Journal of Language Variation and Sociolinguistics 1(1). 119-139.

Introduction. One of the salient differences between free word order languages such as Slavic and fixed order languages such as English consists in the significantly greater movability of the internal argument(s) in the former group, with their relative order being permutable in the postverbal field, and either of the objects being able to move to a preverbal position (Antonyuk 2015; 2024; Bailyn 1995; 2012; Dyakonova 2009; Mykhaylyk 2010; 2011; 2013; Slioussar 2007 i.a.). 

Research gap. While the above characterization is true of East Slavic Ukrainian and Russian, not enough is known about the extent to which the languages differ in this domain, especially with regard to the preverbal objects, where there is less comparable research in the two languages. 

Rationale. A comparative analysis of existing research suggests at least 2 loci of potential variation, i.e., Object Shift (cf. Antonyuk & Mykhaylyk 2022 on OS in Ukrainian) and contrastive/salient preverbal objects (cf. Slioussar & Makarchuk 2022, i.a., on contrastive/salient objects in Russian). Our research suggests the two constructions may be differentiated by their position relative to low adverbs, with Ukrainian OS being pre-adverbial while the Russian contrastive/salient objects are post-adverbial, which potentially suggests distinct structural positions. 

In this talk we report on the results of a corpus study on Ukrainian word order which focuses on preverbal objects, and furthermore provides a comparison of our Ukrainian corpus data to the Russian corpus data on SOV reported in Slioussar & Makarchuk (2022). 

Based on the assumption that the strong focus of relevant linguistic research on so-called primary options expressing predicative possession with a human possessor and an indefinite alienable possessum (Stassen 2009: 30) obscures the richness of cross-linguistic phenomenology in the possessive domain, I present data for discussion concerning secondary or marked options (Herslund/Baron 2001: 9-12).On the one hand, my talk deals with predicative possessive constructions that are dedicated to the expression of OWNERSHIP and function as (partial) synonyms of the primary option (Dixon 2010: 302), on the other hand, under the title appertentive (Haspelmath 2025), BELONG constructions are discussed.

Although the existence of corresponding constructions is repeatedly pointed out in the specialist literature (e.g. Seiler 1983: 64-65), Heine 1997: 29-33) and these are also used to define the prototypical possessive function of the primary option (i.e. “ownership”) (Stassen 2009: 10-11, Aikhenvald 2013: 27-36, Mazzitelli 2015: 36-42), they are usually excluded from further consideration.

It is doubtful whether the cognitive space of possession (Stassen 2009: 15) can be satisfactorily captured in such a reductionist manner, either in individual languages or across languages.

In previous studies (Stolz/Levkovych 2017, 2019, 2020) it has already been shown that typologically informative patterns emerge if and when the expression of the construction functions OWN/POSSESS and BELONG as well as the morphosyntactic strategies used (Croft 2022: 16-22) are systematically recorded and evaluated in a language-comparative manner.

This line of research is continued in my talk by applying a qualitative methodology in order to relate synchric data from languages of all continents within the framework of the functional-typological approach.

References:

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2013. Possession and ownership: a cross-linguistic perspective. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon (eds.). Possession and ownership. A cross-linguistic typology. 1-64. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax. Constructions of the world’s languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Dixon, R.M.W. 2010. Basic linguistic theory. Vol. 2: Grammatical topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Haspelmath, Martin. 2025. Non-verbal clause construction. Language and Linguistics Compass 19 (2). dx.doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.70007 .
Heine, Bernd. 1997. Possession. Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Herslund, Michael & Iréne Baron. 2001. Introduction: Dimensions of possession. In Irène Baron, Michael Herslund & Finn Sørensen (eds.). Dimensions of possession. 1-26. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Mazzitelli, Lidia Federica. 2015. The expression of predicative possession. A comparative study of Belarusian and Lithuanian. Berlin, München, Boston: DeGruyter Mouton.
Seiler, Hanjakob. 1983. Possession as an operational dimension of language. Tübingen: Narr.
Stassen, Leon. 2009. Predicative possession. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stolz, Thomas & Nataliya Levkovych. 2017. 'haben - besitzen - gehören': Einige Vorüberlegungen zu einer typologisch inspirierten Komplettierung der Possessionsforschung. In Aina Urdze & Nataliya Levkovych (Hgg.). Linguistik im Nordwesten. 95-127. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
Stolz, Thomas & Nataliya Levkovych. 2019. On belonging: preliminary thoughts on the typology of belong-constructions. In Lars Johanson, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli & Irina Nevskaya (eds.). Possession in languages of Europe and North and Central Asia. 313-364. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Stolz, Thomas & Nataliya Levkovych. 2020. On different ways of belonging in Europe. In Luka Szucsich, Agnes Kim & Uliana Yazhinova (eds.). Areal convergence in Eastern Central European languages and beyond. 245-280. Berlin: Lang.

The rivalry between compounding and nominal phrases is a well-established topic in the literature. In our study we focus on the role of relational adjectives (RAs) within noun phrases (NPs) in contrast to nominal non-heads of compounds in German. Thematic RAs in NPs with deverbal head nouns are syntactically distinctive, as they exhibit an argument structure relation to the head noun. Werner et al. (in print) conducted a psycholinguistic experiment with monolingual German-speaking adults to investigate the semantic contribution of the two constructions (compounds vs. NPs with a thematic RA) to argument structure interpretation. The study controlled for the head noun, using identical deverbal event nominalizations (e.g., Gegnerausspähen vs. gegnerisches Ausspähen ‘enemy spying’, Arztbefragen vs. ärztliches Befragen ‘doctor questioning’). The results clearly indicate that in NPs, the RA encodes the role of the external argument, whereas in compounds, the non-head nominal encodes the role of the internal argument. The focus of this talk is on our follow-up experiment, based on Werner et al. (in print) and adapted for school-aged children (13 to 16 years). The aim was to test the hypothesis that the semantic and syntactic differentiation between the two inherently ambiguous construction types observed in adults is the result of a developmental process in later stages of language acquisition.

Modern computational models of word recognition and production view words, not morphemes, as basic units of lexical processing. As subword information is crucial for recognising previously unseen words and producing new words, these models usually assume that whole-word processing can be approximated by presenting each word as a sequence of characters or n-grams. While resorting to n-gram representations allows to solve many problems of the morpheme-based approach, it gives rise to many new problems. From a cognitive perspective, it remains unclear exactly what, according to these models, is represented in the mental lexicon and how speakers acquire n-grams of certain sizes in the process of learning. From a computational perspective, it turns out that n-gram representations are often ambiguous and redundant due to the limited use of distributional information.

In my study, I propose a new computational model of morphology that is based on graph theory and is intended to elaborate the word-based approach. The model represents a network of morphological elements segmented out of individual words through distributional analysis which is driven by two general factors: formal similarity and co-occurrence frequency. In the model, a single distributional learning mechanism is used to account for the emergence of morphological structure and the formation of complex words. It is based on a key concept of graph theory, the notion of shortest path, which refers to the task of finding optimal paths between two nodes in a network. Semantics is also represented in the model distributionally, by means of network-informed word embeddings. I contend that just as word meanings are inherently context-determined, so are the meanings of those units of word structure that are singled out from words by the shortest path analysis.

This talk focuses on the pragmatics of topicalized infinitives (=TI) with verb doubling in Spanish (e.g., “trabajar, sí que trabaja…”, which means something like ‘as for working, s/he does work’). The Spanish data will be punctually contrasted with Portuguese, French and Italian data. Two specific case studies will be presented:

The first compares two variants of TI in Spanish, namely with and without Sp. por (e.g., “por doler, duele” vs. “doler, duele”, both meaning ‘as for hurting, it hurts’). In an experiment I tested whether there was a preference for one of the variants depending on two contextual variables: (i) scalarity and (ii) adversativity. The results show that the first variable is highly relevant, as the variant with por is preferred in (exaggerated or unreal) scalar contexts (e.g., por doler, me duele incluso el pelo ‘as for hurting, even my hair hurts’). In contrast, the second variable is not significant (adversativity; e.g., [por] doler, duele, pero no importa ‘as for hurting, it hurts, but I don’t care’).

In the second study, I analyse the concatenation or accumulation of several sentence topics in spoken language. The aim is to discuss the position of TI in such a topic hierarchy (based on hierarchies proposed in the literature, mainly for Italian). The corpus data suggest that TIs occupy the lowest position, as they appear systematically after e.g. topicalized pronominal subjects: “¿[…], no se toma una cerveza? ¿No?”  – “No, ella tomar no toma.” (COSER-5404_01). 

Classifying constructions, such as fire arms or a night of passion, serve the purpose of specifying the type of entity denoted, whereby the classifying noun (or adjective) functions as a conceptual restriction of the property, not the referent set. In this talk, I present collaborative research conducted with Evelien Keizer (University of Vienna) and Thomas Schwaiger (University of Vienna) where we compare the use of compounds (fire arms) and constructions with a post-modifier (head-classifier constructions or HCCs; man of faith) in three languages: English, German and Dutch. 

What is interesting about these constructions is that despite the difference in form, they can often be used without a clearly discernible difference in meaning (date of birth vs birth date). Nevertheless, corpus data shows that there often is a clear preference for one of the two constructions: prison of war (194 tokens BNC)/war prisoner (4 tokens BNC); Steinmauer ‘stone wall’ (3,627 DeReKo) to Mauer aus Steinen or Mauer aus Stein ‘wall of stone(s)’ (80 and 102 respectively DeReKo); geboortedatum ‘birth date’ (5,468 CHN) rather than datum van geboorte ‘date of birth’ (11 CHN). German and Dutch seem to have a clear preference for compounding; however, in all three languages there are instances where only the postnominal alternative seems to be used, e.g. bird of prey, Mann von Mut ‘man of courage’, man van inhoud ‘man of substance’. 

This presentation discusses the findings from two studies. The first focuses on English and argues that the HCC is a construction in its own right. The second looks at data from all three languages addressing the question: Is there a correlation between the choice of construction (in any of the three languages) and the type of relation between the two nouns? Working within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008), this study explores how semantics, and also to some extent pragmatics, influences syntactic form in the noun phrase. 

In most traditional grammars, manner is treated as a circumstance — one among others such as time, place, or cause. This classification is often taken for granted. But does it adequately reflect the syntactic behavior and semantic import of manner expressions?

This talk challenges the view that manner is merely circumstantial by re-examining its interaction with core aspects of verbal predication, especially in relation to agency. Drawing on a functional perspective, I argue that manner expressions are deeply entangled with the internal structure of the event.

This argument relies on the assumption that we can distinguish between genuine manner, which is tightly linked to the event structure, and substitute manner, which only creates the illusion of manner in contexts where no specific manner is explicitly expressed.

Furthermore, the talk investigates how manner interacts with agentivity: rather than merely conveying information about the predicate, manner can also characterize the agent in the act of performing the action.

Ultimately, this talk invites a broader reflection on how we define and delimit the adverb in linguistic theory.

Prepositional phrases often involve nominalisation: Fr. parler à la légère, Ger. Im K/klaren sein, in K/kürze, auf die S/schnelle. The paper proposes a diachronic hypothesis and a functional-semantic analysis of the construction. It also discusses the hypothesis of ellipsis, e.g., Ger. auf die schnelle Art und Weise > auf die Schnelle. Finally, it should be said that this is a talk about work in progress.

Although the official language in Malaysia is Malay, there is a significant population of Chinese speakers, especially in urban centres. The history of Kuala Lumpur in the Klang Valley is closely related to the migration of Cantonese- and Hakka-speaking Chinese migrants to Malaya and tin mining activities in the area. Two Sinitic groups stood out from the beginning, the Cantonese and the Hakkas. While Cantonese ultimately became the dominant Chinese variety, Hakkas are more associated with adjacent areas such as Kajang. In a study on Cantonese, which is used as a lingua franca by the Chinese in the Klang Valley area, its usage is analyzed to determine the linguistic situation. Furthermore, a Hakka family mostly situated in Kuala Lumpur and Kajang is analyzed for language use. The study aims to describe the linguistic landscape of Chinese Malaysians in the Klang Valley metropolitan area and the language shift from South-Sinitic varieties to Malaysian Standard Chinese. The Chinese are a very big minority in Malaysia which is politically dominated by the Malay majority, with Malay as the only national language, and English having semi-official status. Old Chinese speakers typically belong to one of the various South-Sinitic languages; Malay and English are spoken in colloquial varieties (Bahasa Pasar, Malaysian English). However, young speakers reportedly adopt Mandarin as their first language. As the lingua franca of the Chinese in the Klang Valley area, Cantonese is still acquired by all generations but has seen a decline in proficiency and usage. Finally, the study of a Hakka family network provides very similar results: The last fully competent speakers of Hakka are roughly 30 years old, while the younger generations typically abandon Hakka language use, although still understanding the language. Chinese in Malaysia is an interesting case where a strong minority does not fully assimilate to the national language, but also maintains their own linguistic resources. The reasons for this development may be found in the cultural gap between the various ethnic groups which makes the Chinese create their own educational and economic infrastructure. Furthermore, the formerly linguistically disparate group enjoys the ability to draw from another nationally maintained standard language – Chinese Mandarin.

Language has been argued to mirror our mental processes (Chomsky, 2006) and reflect traits of certain psychological disorders (Fine, 2006). Most studies at this interface between linguistics and psychology have been conducted from the perspective of psychology (e.g., Williamson, 1991; Kuperberg, 2010), even though it carries significance for linguists as well (e.g., Hunt & Grant, 2022). One field of linguistics in which such research is becoming increasingly important is forensic linguistics, particularly in the context of profiling anonymous writers and in authorship comparisons. This presentation will outline existing research at the interface of linguistics and psychology with a focus on narcissism and the personality disorder of psychopathy, and will exemplify selected phenomena with a dataset of the murderer Jack Unterweger. 

The data presented consists of two sets: one set of 14 personal letters used in a pilot study (Marko & Leibetseder, 2023), which are addressed to one female addressee; the second set of 100 texts consists of letters addressed to different people in a variety of contexts. The focus of the analysis will be on phenomena of cohesion/coherence, as well as on (self-)distancing, pronoun use, self- and other presentation, and verbal processes. Preliminary results suggests that the psychopathic trait of impulsivity is reflected in issues related to cohesion/coherence, and that self-distancing might be achieved using third person personal pronouns and proper names. The aim of this presentation is to highlight the benefits of interdisciplinary research and the practical relevance thereof in the field of forensic linguistics. 

The talk explores the implications of the Unbundled Voice syntactic architecture (Pylkkänen 2008, Harley 2017, as well as Alexiadou et al. 2015, Alexiadou 2015, Schäfer 2008, 2012, i.a.), focusing primarily on the Merge position for the Inanimate Causer argument and the issues of case assignment. In particular, I will discuss a Case Alternation in Ukrainian whereby the Instrumentally case-marked Inanimate Causer argument in a Transitive Impersonal can be alternatively realized as a Nominative case-marked argument in an Active Transitive and propose a derivation that models the Case Alternation, arguing in favor of a phasal approach according to which ApplP, a high Applicative phrase, constitutes a phase (Antonyuk 2024; McGinnis 2001), which derives the correct result. Ultimately, we propose a decompositional view of Voice that allows us to derive certain unexplained properties of the construction in question as well as derive some cross-linguistic variation in this domain.

The aim of this contribution is to present insight into the linguistic and socio-cultural contents of the "Bocabulario de la lengua sangleya  por las letras del A.B.C." , an Early Manila Hokkien-Spanish dictionary prepared by Spanish missionaries in Manila at the beginning of the 17th century. The "Bocabulario", rather neglected by sinologists and hispanists in equal measure, stands out because of its encyclopedic and linguistic contents which served the exogenous Spanish missionaries not only in the context of proselytization, but also in everyday life in vicinity of the (also exogenous) Sangleys, i.e. the Chinese community of Manila.The study is based on a critical edition of the "Bocabulario" made by the contributor in collaboration with Henning Klöter (Chinese studies, Berlin, Germany) and Martina Scholger (TEI-modelling, Graz, Austria) as part of the joint project “Early Manila Hokkien (EMHo): language, missionary linguistics and migration as reflected in the Bocabulario de lengua sangleya por las letraz de el A.B.C.” funded by the German 

Root-adjacent and argument structure-modifying morphology has been at the center of a recent debate in morphological theory on the status of verb conjugation classes, “templates”, theme vowels and verbalizing morphology in general (Fábregas 2017; Panagiotidis, Spyropoulos & Revithiadou 2017; Kastner 2020; Kastner & Marin 2020; Simonović & Mišmaš 2023; Kovačević, Milosavljević & Simonović 2024 a.m.o). A crucial question is if and how this morphology interacts with root meaning and to what extent it introduces abstract meaning itself (e.g., BECOME, CAUSE, DO).  However, these problems are rarely treated from a diachronic point of view (with some exceptions, e.g., Grestenberger 2022, 2023; Calabrese & Petrosino 2023) because 1) there is an insufficient empirical basis for generalizations concerning the diachrony of argument-changing morphology and 2) it is unclear whether changes affecting this morphology should be expected to follow specific patterns, parallel to “cycles” in syntactic change. Based on case studies from Greek (Grestenberger 2022; Marescotti & Grestenberger 2024), NW Germanic (Grestenberger, Werner, Anderson & Sichrovsky 2024) and Latin, I will address this empirical gap and argue that the diachrony of denominal and deadjectival verbs in these languages provides evidence for unidirectional reanalysis paths that give rise to specific types of Aktionsart/v-related morphology. I focus in particular on verb classes that have been described as ambiguous between expressing states and activities and as iteratives/pluractionals in the literature and show how their argument and event structure properties developed diachronically. At the end of the talk I will briefly discuss the implications for building a diachronic typology of morphosyntactic reanalysis and its implications for comparative reconstruction. 

Research in Conversation Analysis, mostly on English, has found that speakers do not express agreement and disagreement with their interlocutors in the same way, but that they follow particular patterns in their turn design. In a default friendly context, agreement tends to be expressed immediately and with ‘strong’ prosody while disagreement tends to be delayed, mitigated and prosodically ‘downgraded’. This pattern has been found to be reversed in arguments and discussions. In this talk, I examine how speakers of Austrian German express affiliation (i.e., agreement or disagreement) regarding the prosody and the timing of their turns. On the basis of a corpus of spontaneous casual conversations, I address two questions. First, to which degree do speakers of Austrian German follow the patterns that were described for English? Second, which other interactional aspects (such as epistemic authority and face concerns) account for different patterns in terms of prosody and timing in agreements and disagreements?

False friends are words in two languages that appear similar in form or pronunciation but have entirely different meanings, often confusing language learners. For example, the English word gift (meaning "present") and the German word Gift (meaning "poison") are false friends. Their deceptive similarity can cause learners to misinterpret meanings, leading to translation errors and delayed lexical access. In contrast, true friends are words that look and sound similar in two languages and share the same meaning, such as garden in English and Garten in German, which typically facilitates more straightforward translation. Unrelated words, like tired (English) and müde (German), have no resemblance in form or meaning and require learners to rely solely on vocabulary knowledge without form-based cues. This study investigates the cognitive challenges presented by false friends in second language acquisition through three experiments, each focusing on different aspects of translation performance. 

The first experiment examined participants' ability to judge the correctness of word translations under six conditions involving true friends, false friends, and unrelated word pairs, each with correct and incorrect translations. Participants, divided into two groups (English-German and German-English), showed the highest error rates and slower response times when translating false friends, indicating interference during lexical access. True friends yielded the fastest and most accurate translations, while unrelated words resulted in moderate errors. 

The second experiment explored how context influences the translation of false friends. Participants translated coherent text, shuffled sentences, or isolated words. The findings revealed that context significantly improved translation accuracy, with the cohesive text condition yielding the fewest errors. False friends caused more mistakes in isolated word tasks, suggesting that contextual cues help learners avoid 'false-friend translations'. 

The third experiment focused on teaching strategies for vocabulary retention, comparing traditional methods (e.g., repetition) and modern techniques (e.g., games and mind maps) in teaching false friends. Participants completed pre-tests, post-tests, and delayed post-tests. While all methods improved learning outcomes, traditional techniques showed slightly better long-term retention. False friends remained the most challenging word type to master, even after instruction, highlighting the need for targeted teaching approaches.

Overall, the study emphasises the complexity of false friends introduced in second language acquisition and the importance of contextual learning and strategic teaching methods to mitigate their effects.

In the extensive history of formal approaches to word formation, pairs of nominalisations such as destroying vs. destruction and refusing vs. refusal, have played an important role. As initially discussed already in Remarks on Nominalisation (Chomsky 1970), a central insight is that -ing nominalisations exhibit more verbal properties compared to -ion and -al nominalisations, with the latter potentially functioning as root nominalisations devoid of any verbal structure.

One aspect of these pairs that has received limited attention in formal linguistic theorising is their divergent origins: -ing nominalisations are Germanic, whereas -ion and -al nominalisations are Latinate. The reduced or absent internal structure of Latinate nominalisations can be linked to a claim in the language-contact literature, suggesting that borrowings typically enter the recipient language as morphologically simplex forms with a specific (i.e., non-compositional) meaning (Simonović 2015; Simonović & Arsenijević 2018). While this may accurately describe the initial status of borrowed nominalisations, it is evident that some borrowed nominalisations develop compositional meanings over time, becoming (partially) synonymous with native nominalisations

The proposed project, “Something borrowed, something new, something with no internal structure? Borrowed nominalisations across languages”, aims to investigate the phenomenon of borrowed nominalisations in greater depth. The project seeks to examine the constraints governing borrowing, the processes of morphophonological and morphosyntactic integration, as well as the co-existence of native and borrowed nominalisations across diverse languages.

He will present two preliminary corpus-based case studies focusing on Latinate nominalisations in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian. Study 1 (conducted in collaboration with Predrag Kovačević) examines pairs of native and Latinate nominalisations (e.g. the native statificiranje ‘≈ stratifying’ versus the Latinate stratifikacija ‘≈ stratification’). Both types of nominals licence the use of a genitive complement which can be interpreted as the internal argument of the underlying verb (suggesting a verbal structure), as well as pluralisation (indicating a nominal structure). However, a corpus-based analysis reveals that, when considered in pairs, native nominalisations exhibit a significantly higher frequency of genitive complements and a lower frequency of plural forms, whereas Latinate nominalisations display the opposite pattern. Study 2 (conducted in collaboration with Boban Arsenijević and Iva Dozet) is an exploratory investigation into Latinate nominalisations ending in -cija/-zija/-sija. The primary objective is to determine the factors that predict the low frequency of plural forms among these nouns (which may suggest a stronger verbal structure). We examine several potential predictors, including the overall frequency of the nominalisation, the phonological segment preceding -cija/-zija/-sija—with a particular focus on the vowels a and i, which correspond to the most common verbal theme vowels in BCMS — as well as the existence of a morphologically related verb. Additionally, we consider the presence of agentive nominalisations in -tor and -nt (e.g. okupator and okupant ‘≈ occupier’), which are related to nominalisations such as okupacija       ‘≈ occupation’. Our preliminary findings suggest that the presence of overt theme vowels and an attested related verb are significant predictors of the low frequency of plural forms. In contrast, a higher overall lemma frequency appears to correlate with an increased frequency of plurals.

Postcolonial countries in the Global South are characterised by a "double divide" (Mohanty 2010) or "layered and stratified multilingualism" (Lafkoui 2024): official language, often of colonial origin, regional languages of wider communication and small local languages exist in nested diglossic relationships. But this hierarchical view of roles and domains for languages does not tell the full story, nor do small-scale multilingual practices can be entirely subsumed under the image of minoritised language. In this talk, I explore small-scale multilingualism in a number of global settings, focusing on ideas of language, identity and language use emerging from them so that they can enrich the conceptual library of multilingualism research.

Oceanic languages, which belong to the Austronesian family, are known to display patient-backgrounding phenomena, where the verb is morphologically intransitive and the object is semantically and syntactically backgrounded to varying degrees. In my talk, I provide a preliminary typology of object-backgrounding phenomena in a balanced sample of 30 Oceanic languages from all first-order subgroups of the family, reviewing parameters such as verbal marking, phonological/morpho-syntactic dependence of the object, type of allowed modifiers, ability of the object to undergo syntactic operations (relativization, applicativization, topicalization), and semantic properties (animacy, referentiality, (in)definiteness). I show that the types so far described in literature (incorporation, transitivity discord, oblique object encoding, and object deletion) are unevenly distributed throughout the family, with oblique object encoding being almost completely absent in Western Oceanic.

In some languages, the reference to plural events is claimed to be grammatically encoded. While this phenomenon has been widely reported in relation to Aktionsart-changing morphology (Newman 1980; Lasersohn 1995; Henderson 2017), pluractional readings have also been claimed to arise outside the VP (Stump 1981; Hoeksema 1983; Gillon 1987; Landman 1996; van Geenhoven 2004): For instance, it has often been proposed that events expressed in the present perfect in English are necessarily repeatable in cases such as ‘I have been in love (before)’ (Zandvort 1932; McCawley 1971; Inoue 1978; Dahl 1985; Michaelis 1994; Katz 2003; Mittwoch 2008). The association of the perfect with readings of plural events appears to be fully systematic in other languages: in Galician, an understudied language spoken in Northwestern Spain, the perfect is claimed to rule out single-event interpretations: Teño estado en Roma ‘I have been to Rome (*once)’ (Rojo 1974; Ferreiro 1996; Freixeiro Mato 1998; Álvarez and Xove 2002; Jardon Perez 2021, 2022). In this talk, I present the results of two experiments, one in English and one in Galician, investigating the psychological reality of these claims: How people think about which number of events to construe based on a linguistic utterance, in this case a simple sentence in the perfect (vs. past). Our findings reveal that the perfect leads people to imagine several events significantly more often than the past, in both languages, supporting the idea that pluractionality is a real phenomenon in people’s minds, and it can be triggered by (semi)functional forms outside the VP.

This talk examines the integration of loan verbs from Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) into Kruševac Gurbet Romani (KŠGR), highlighting how surface morphology and phonology of the BCMS source verbs shape their integration into the KŠGR conjugation system. Using a corpus of 5399 tokens (361 borrowed verbal forms across 157 lemmas) drawn from bilingual BCMS/Romani articles, I analyse the competition between two conjugation classes characterised by the vowels -o- and -i- (e.g., finansir-i-l ‘to finanse’ from BCMS finansirati, čit-o-l ‘to read’ from BCMS čitati).

The study evaluates the influence of phonological and morphological factors, to wit the theme vowel (TV) class of the BCMS source verb, the stem-final vowel, and the presence or absence of derivational suffixes in the BCMS source verb. While the -i- class dominates among borrowed verbs, the -o- class persists, particularly for verbs that lack derivational affixes and those based on BCMS verbs from the TV class a/a. The analysis also reveals a dissimilatory effect linked to the final vowel of the source stem, whereby the conjugation marker -i- is avoided after a stem final i.

The results of chi-square tests and decision tree analyses will be presented, along with a discussion of how these factors interact to determine integration outcomes. The findings contribute to understanding not only the specific dynamics of KŠGR verb integration but also the broader implications for modelling loanword integration.

The project The Third Way: Prepositional Adverbials from Latin to Romance (FWF P 30751, 2018-2022) foregrounded the hypothesis of prepositional adverbs (e.g. ,Sp. en breve; cf. Engl. in short) being a diachronic result of the typological process of transformation from Latin to Romance called analyticisation, the starting point being adverbial adjectives (cf. “short adverbs”) according to the schema Lat. brevi > Sp. en breve. It has been claimed that prepositional adverbs constitute a major third way of expressing adverbial functions, alongside with adverbial adjectives and adverbs ending in -mente. Martin Hummel will briefly present some major results. The follow-up project “Prepositional adverbials in primary dialects of Romance (FWF P 37209, 2024-2027) argues that adverbs ending in -mente are almost lacking in primary dialects of Romance. Consequently, prepositional adverbs are considered the second way of productively conveying adverbial functions. Stefan Koch will present this recently started project.

In the adnominal domain, the self-intensifier sam ‘self’ in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) performs at least two functions. It can act as a modifier that, descriptively speaking, reduces imprecision or vagueness, closely matching English true/real or very (e.g., sam vrh ‘the very top,’ or postao je sam đavo ‘he became a real devil / the devil himself’). It can also function as an intensifier, presumably marking that the referent of the nominal is the member of the subset of discourse-topical referents with the highest degree of aboutness, as viewed by the interlocutors (e.g., sreli smo kraljicu samu ‘we met the queen herself’) (Arsenijević 2024). In existing literature, these two functions are often treated as distinct phenomena (e.g., for Russian, Goncharov 2015). In this talk, I argue for a unified semantic account of these two seemingly disparate functions of sam, proposing that, both as a modifier and a self-intensifier, it functions as a maximizer targeting the endpoint (i.e., the maximal value) on an available scale.

This study examines how languages are practiced and managed among various Chinese families in multilingual Malaysia. The study was conducted through ethnographic observation and interview in selected Chinese communities in the states of Perlis, Penang, Malacca, Sabah, and Sarawak. Two research questions are as follows: (1) how language practices, ideologies and management strategies operate within the Chinese families; and (2) how and why the heritage languages (HLs) are maintained or shifted. The predominant view underlying family practices seems to be the common belief about the adverse effects of HL acquisition on the development of the majority languages (i.e., English, Malay, and Mandarin). However, given the complicated minority-majority language reality in Malaysia, it is unclear whether the family has a real choice in determining which language(s) it wishes to transmit and preserve. The findings reveal that language choices are constantly interacting with and shaped by non-linguistic influences, for instance, the national language policy, socioeconomic opportunities, educational concerns, and the possible impact of geopolitics and geo-economics. By examining family language practices and ideologies, this paper argues that these notions can be used as a means to understand/reflect language vitality and, more importantly, the potential marginalization of the HL(s) in the society. The study indicates how language shift is taking place inter-generationally and the need to redress major efforts in cherishing and maintaining HLs in the Chinese Malaysian communities.

An important question in the argument structure and event structure research concerns the role that notions such as causer or event initiator play in the syntax, as well as the exact nature of their syntactic representation and licensing. One prominent line of research argues in favor of the Undifferentiated Initiator view, according to which Agents, non-volitional Causers and Natural Force arguments are all merged in Spec,VoiceP position (Ramchand 2008; Bruening 2013; Legate 2014; Wood 2017 i.a.; Cf. Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2006; 2015; Schäfer 2012). We present novel evidence in favor of the differential encoding of causation as separate from the external argument (EA)-introducing VoiceP layer, thus arguing against the Undifferentiated Initiator (UI) view. We examine a wide range of constructions in Ukrainian that bear on the matter, relying, i.a., on the Scope Freezing Diagnostic (SFD, per Antonyuk 2015; 2020; forthcoming i.a.), and drawing on relevant crosslinguistic evidence from Polish, Icelandic, Lithuanian, German, and English.

We show that all (Inanimate) causer arguments in Ukrainian are necessarily encoded as NPINSTR,  and provide evidence to suggest that apart from the differential encoding of EAs and non-volitional Causers, no further differentiation is observed, i.e., all Causers are merged in the Specifier of the same projection, as the sole argument of vCauseP. While this is in line with the three-layered verbal VoiceP--vP--√ architecture (Harley 2013; Pylkkänen 2002; 2008), a single Merge position for the more transparently causative Non-volitional Causers and Natural Force arguments as well as the far less obvious manner-of-action and Instrument arguments suggests the differentiation in thematic roles is viewed by syntax as less important compared to the shared causative component (Cf. Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou and Schäfer 2006; 2015; Schäfer 2012).

The account derives a range of Transitive Impersonal constructions in Ukrainian, whereby the internal argument is probed Accusative in the absence of an active Voice layer (see also Antonyuk forthcoming; Cf. esp. Legate 2014) and has a range of theoretical implications, including for the analysis of the Causative Alternation, to be discussed in this talk.

The so-called lexical cloning (LC, Horn 2018), also widely known as contrastive focus reduplication (Ghomeshi et al. 2004) or identical constituents compounding (Hohenhaus 2004), is typically analyzed as identifying the prototypical instance in the denotation or extension of a predicate (e.g., DOG-dog as a typical dog). However, LC also targets functional words, such as quantifiers, pronouns, modals, polarity items (the first two in a variety of languages, the latter two at least in Serbo-Croatian). It gives rise to different types of interpretations, such as domain widening, precisification, or contrasting referents. In this talk, I offer a unified approach to LC as a multifunctional pattern within the framework of situation semantics. I argue that LC focuses a situation pronoun as an argument of the given predicate: it indicates that the predicate is true of an entity (individual or eventuality) in a situation s, as well as in an alternative, broader situation s’ that contains s, differing from it only minimally, with contextually tolerable or speaker-imposed exceptions.

We experimentally evaluate three patterns of deverbal nominalizations derived by means of zero, ‑ing and Latinate suffixes (i.e. -(at)ion, -ment, and -ance) in terms of their ability to express causative and inchoative readings like their base verbs. Previous theoretical literature argues that causative readings require an overt nominalizing suffix, and thus zero nominalizations can only realize inchoative readings: see John’s raising/*raise of the glass vs. The elevator’s rise to the top floor. This would suggest that zero nominalizations are structurally simpler than overt nominalizations. However, natural text corpora reveal plenty of zero nominalizations exhibiting causative readings: e.g. a continuous raise of salaries, the deliberate crash of a Germanwings passenger jet. We test these claims using native speaker questionnaires. We predict that zero nominalizations will be capable of receiving both causative and inchoative readings, and thus do not necessarily have simpler event structures than overt nominalizations.

There are two types of nominalizations: those formed by the nominalizer n and those formed by D. The latter type involves a fully verbal structure prior to being nominalized by D. As a result, the DP layer serves distinct functions in the two types. This talk focuses on a property closely tied to the DP layer: referentiality. Specifically, it asks: are D-nominalizations referential, and in what sense? I will demonstrate that the two verbal gerunds in English, POSS-ing (Justin's/his smashing his laptop) and ACC-ing (Justin/him smashing his laptop), despite their similarities in surface form, distribution and meaning, are differentiated by their referential properties. I will then compare how referentiality operates in POSS-ing with the same concept in the clausal domain. Finally, I will explore the semantic and pragmatic implications of referentiality and its formal representation.

Juǀ’hoan is a Ju language of the Kx’a family spoken in Namibia and Botswana by communities of ethnic San, an exonym used to refer to the indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa. Similar to English, Juǀ’hoan has grammatical gender system in which classes of nouns are made known through the use of distinctive pronouns. As a largely non-standardised language and spoken in a myriad of different sociolinguistic contexts, the grammatical gender system is anything but stable. This variation offers a window into language acquisition and maintenance, and the development of new registers and varieties. Comparing data from different communities of practice, this talk elaborates on the ongoing diversification of the Juǀ’hoan gender system(s), detailing the specific linguistic ecosystems and language ideologies behind these developments.