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Welcome to the Department of General Linguistics!

Emmy-Noether-Research Group

The Emmy-Noether Research Group on Non-Hierarchicality in Grammar (NonGram) examines the formation of syntactic structures in constructions without a formal word-class distinction from a typological perspective; the languages studied are Waima'a (Austronesian), Kera'a (Sino-Tibetan), Warlpiri (Pama-Nyunga) and Vedic Sanskrit (Indo-European).

CRC project on Diachrony of Predication in Old Indo-Aryan

Project B03 of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1252 on Prominence in Language, located at the University of Cologne, is led by Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl and Prof. Dr. Gerrit Dimmendaal and explores how in the history of Indo-Aryan infinite participial forms developed into main clause predicates. Image: Vedic Prose and a Pillar of Aśoka, © by Simon Fries

VedaWeb

VedaWeb 2.0 is the DFG-funded follow-up project of VedaWeb, a Digital Humanities project led by Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl in cooperation with other researchers. It aims at creating a web-based, openly accessible and collaborative platform for linguistic research on Old Indo-Aryan texts.

Fieldwork on Kera'a

Within the scope of the Emmy-Noether Research Group on Non-Hierarchicality in GrammarNaomi Peck and Prof. Dr. Reinöhl study Kera'a, a Trans-Himalayan language located in the North-East of the Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh, spoken by about 10,000 Idu Mishmi.

Fieldwork on Waima'a

Within the scope of the Emmy-Noether Research Group on Non-Hierarchicality in Grammar, Kirsten Culhane explores the prosody of Waima'a, an Austronesian language spoken by about 18,000 people in East Timor, an island country located in the Indonesian archipelago.

PhD Project on Warlpiri

Within the scope of her PhD project tied to the Emmy-Noether Research Group on Non-Hierarchicality in Grammar, Maria Vollmer studies Warlpiri, a Pama-Nyungan language spoken by about 2'300 people in the Australian Northern Territory. She is especially interested in how language change and language contact reflect in morphosyntax. Image: Papunya/Warumpi, © by James Gray

News

  • 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 2024

    This 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