Welcome to the Department of General Linguistics!
News
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Call for papers: How much is too much? The one-new-idea constraint and related phenomena at the information-intonation interface
Deadline for Abstracts: 15th March 2024
Acceptance Notification: 05 April 2024This workshop invites contributions researching the packaging of information relative to intonation units. Seminal studies including Chafe (1979, 1994), Givón (1983), and Pawley & Syder (1983) have suggested universal cognitive constraints on how much new information may be expressed in a prosodic chunk, e.g. Chafe’s “one new idea constraint”. Despite their wide-reaching implications, and their impact on fields including discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, and typology, these claims still largely await testing for more languages as well as discourse types.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers empirically testing the one-new-idea constraint and related topics at the information-intonation interface. This may include research on information packaging in prosodic units other than the intonation unit or on types of information that have received less attention in the literature. We particularly welcome contributions on lesser studied languages in an effort to probe the claimed universality of the proposed constraints. We also welcome diverse methodological approaches including, but not limited to, corpus-linguistic, experimental, discourse-analysis or interactional-linguistic approaches.
Invited researchers include Nikolaus Himmelmann (Cologne), Pavel Ozerov (Innsbruck) and Stefan Schnell (Zurich).
Date: 12th-13th July 2024
Location: University of Freiburg, Germany
Organizers: Uta Reinöhl, Naomi Peck
Please submit your abstract by 15th of March 2024 to: naomi.peck@linguistik.uni-freiburg.de -
Congratulations to Laura Becker on winning SLE's Coseriu Award for her monograph "Articles in the world's languages"!
- The HPCL lecture series "Language, Communication & Cognition" continues.
You can find the lecture dates here. - Congratulations to Wifek Bouaziz on winning the alumni award for her M.A. thesis on "Routinisation in Joint Action: (Dis-)Alignment as a coordination resource - Collaborative transcription of a Kera’a shamanic ritual"!
- New Master's programme: Linguistics: Language, Communication and Cognition
The new Master's programme Linguistics: Language, Communication and Cognition starts in the winter semester 2023/24. The programme is organised by the linguistics departments in Freiburg. Depending on the choice of the field of study, it is possible to study the programme exclusively in English. You can find further information on the programme and the fields of study here.
Current Publications
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Reinöhl, Uta and Ellison, T. Mark. "Metaphor forces argument overtness" Linguistics, AoP, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0072
- Becker, Laura, Matías Guzmán Naranjo, and Samira Ochs. “Socio-Linguistic Effects on Conditional Constructions: A Quantitative Typological Study.” In Sociolinguistic and Typological Perspectives on Language Variation, edited by Silvia Ballarè and Guglielmo Inglese, 121–54. De Gruyter Mouton, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110781168-005.
- Schnell, Stefan, Geoffrey Haig, Nils Norman Schiborr & Maria Vollmer. 2023. Are referent introductions sensitive to forward planning in discourse? Evidence from Multi-CAST. In Alessandra Barotto & Simone Mattiola (eds.). Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective [Studies in Language Companion Series 227], 231-268. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Vollmer, Maria. 2023. Comparing zero and referential choice in eight languages with a focus on Mandarin Chinese. Studies in Language.