Events

Upcoming Events

The endangerment and loss of languages have been compared to those biological species. However, assuming the same environmentalist approach, linguists have not discussed whether humans are connected to languages in the same ways humans share ecosystems with other biological species. Nor have they discussed how the consequences of humans' abuses or destructions of their ecosystems are comparable to similar to those of some populations giving up their languages. What are the root causes of language endangerment and loss? Do populations that lose their languages do so because they neglect them? And what is the relationship between language and culture? Does the loss of a language really entail that of the culture it is associated with? And many more questions. In somewhat different vein, do languages really have rights to life just as humans have rights to languages? Let's try thinking of languages as technologies that our species invented by self-domestication primarily to serve our communicative needs before they can also index us socially. And let's also look closely at the contact conditions under which some languages have been displaced by competitors, in ways that do not justify the term "killer language." What does history teach us? I wish to address all these questions and others, as I do in my book Ecological Perspectives on Language Endangerment and Loss (2025).
Registration:
Please register for the workshop here: Link
Registration deadline: April 29

POQAL-3: Polar Questions Across Languages
Date: April 29-30, 2026
Location: Historische Sternwarte
Geismar Landstr. 11
37083 Göttingen

The POQAL-3 workshop will be held at the University of Göttingen. For more information on the program, speakers, and updates, please visit the workshop website.
Workshop Website

Registration:
Please register for the workshop here:
Link

Previous Events

Workshop Website

2026

Discrimination Sensitivity Workshop
Date: February 6, 2026
Location: Digital Creative Space (SUB)

Mental Health Workshop with Kerstin Mauth
Date: February 10, 2026
Location: Büttner Raum 2, Heyne Haus

Collaborative Workshop: “Negation meets Form–Meaning Mismatches” with SFB1629 NegLaB (Frankfurt)
Date: January 22–23, 2026
Location: Goethe University Frankfurt
A collaborative event exploring Negation and Form–Meaning Mismatches across Languages.A collaborative event exploring Negation and Form–Meaning Mismatches across Languages.

2025

RTG Retreat WiSe25/26 – November 20-21, 2025 at Mariaspring

Workshop: Onward and Upward, or Not: Form-meaning mismatches in Modality, Agreement, and Negation

This workshop will take place in Georg-August-University Göttingen on November 14, 2025. It will focus on form-meaning mismatches in negation, modality, and agreement. The workshop will include 6 invited talks and a poster session.

Invited Speakers:

Special Session by Josep Quer

Making language needs in youth justice systems visible: COST Action YJustLang: November 3rd, 2025, 15:00 - 17:00 at CRC library


• Sign Language Grammars, Parsing Models, & the Brain – November 6–7, 2025, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive & Brain Sciences


• Modelling Agreement and Movement Workshop: July 10, 2025, 14:15–17:45 at VG 1.105


• RTG Workshop on Ideophones: June 10–11, 2025 at Nikolausberger Weg 23


• Language Fieldwork Workshop: June 2, 2025 at Heyne Haus, Büttner Raum 1


• ConSOLE: January 29–31, 2025


• ViCom Workshop on "Dimensions of Meaning in the Visual Modality": February 13–14, 2025 at the University of Göttingen


• LIMES Colloquium 2025: March 17–19, 2025 at Alte Mensa, Wilhelmsplatz 3

2024


• Agency and Intentions in AI (AIAI): May 16–17, 2024 at the University of Göttingen


• Workshop on Speech Act Related Operators: June 27–29, 2024 at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)


• Form and Meaning of Coordination: July 4–6, 2024 at the University of Göttingen


• Expressing Emotions in Sign Languages: July 4–5, 2024 at the University of Hamburg


• LASER workshop: April 9–11, 2024 at the University of Göttingen


• Clause-type marking in the visual modality: February 28 – March 1, 2024 at Ruhr-Universität Bochum


• ViCom Workshop on "The Linguistic Status of Demonstrations": April 8–10, 2024 at Bold Campus, Königstein/Taunus


• The 2nd Workshop on Charting Honorific and Addressee Morphosyntactic Processes (CHAMP2): February 1–2, 2024, University of Göttingen


• Collaborative Meeting RTG "Nominal Modification" (Frankfurt) and RTG "Form-meaning mismatches" (Göttingen): February 8–9, 2024 at the University of Göttingen

2023


• Factors in Natural Language Design - the Nominal Domain and Beyond , December 11-12, 2023


• Nominal syntax in the medieval and early modern Celtic languages. Part of the research project: 'The syntax of ellipsis and information structure in Old Irish: a typological approach' (PI: Elliott Lash, funded by the DFG), October 27-28, 2023


• Third International Conference on Adverbial Clauses , October 5-6, 2023. Please find the conference program here. The conference will be preceded by the Workshop on Adverbial Clausal in Creole and Pidgin Languages
  
  
• Career Talk @LinG with Dr. Andreas Haida, July 13th, 2023


• LinG Conversations with Andrew Nevins, 20th June - 1st July, 2023


• Career Talk @LinG with Dr. Mirjana Sekicki, July 05th, 2023


• LinG Conversations with Anthi Revithiadou and Vassilios Spyropoulos, May 26, 2023


• LinG Conversations with Giorgia Zorzi, 19-21 April 2023, at Nikolausberger Weg 23


• NELS 53, 12-14 January 2023, at Paulinerkirche in Göttingen



2022



• LinG Conversations with Elly van Gelderen, November 9th and November 23rd, 2022


• Göttingen Summer School in Linguistics 7: "Topics in Corpus Annotation and Data Analysis 2022", 19-30 September 2022, at Göttingen Observatory


• 5th Night of Science, July, 9th, 2022


• Alternatives, Expectations and Domain widening, 19-21 September 2022,
  at Bar-Ilan University


• Conference: "Adverbs and adverbials at the form-meaning interface: diachronic and synchronic perspectives (AAMFI 2022)", 18-20 May 2022, at Göttingen University


• DGfS-Workshop: "Visual Communication. New Theoretical and Empirical Developments", 23-25 February 2022, at University of Tübingen

2021


• “The active child” – A workshop on active learning in early development,
  30 November - 03 December 2021, at Göttingen University


• RTG 2636: Opening Event, September, 14th, 2021 at Göttingen University


• [RESCHEDULED]Göttingen fall school in linguistics 2021: "Anaphora and presuppositions", 30 August – 3 September 2021, at Göttingen University


• Workshop: "On the nouniness of prepositional arguments" (Annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) 2021), 23-26 February 2021, at University of Freiburg


• Interdisciplinary workshop: "Agency and Intentions in Language" (AIL), 13-15 January 2021, at Göttingen University (virtual)

2020


• Workshop: "Analogical Patterns in Inflectional Morphology", 16-17 April 2020, at Göttingen University


• Linguistic Diversity and Linguistic Modalities: New Perspectives on Bimodal (Sign Language/Oral Language) Bilingualism (Workshop at the Annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) 2020), 4–6 March 2020, at University of Hamburg


• LinG3 – (A)symmetries in spoken and sign languages , 5-6 February 2020, at Göttingen University


• Workshop: "Große Korpora in der Praxis: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen" (Einführung in die Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD)), 27-28 January 2020, at Göttingen University

2019


• New Ways of Analyzing Ancient Greek, 1 (part of LinG2), 13-14 December 2019, at Göttingen University


• NaP2019 – Number and plurality: cross-linguistic variation in the nominal domain (part of LinG2), 11-12 December 2019, at Göttingen University


• LinG Workshop on Sign Languages, 12 September 2019, at Göttingen University


• Summer School "Speech Acts", 8–19 July 2019, at Göttingen University


• Workshop: "Dimensions of wh-words: A German-Italian question time", 6-8 May 2019, Villa Vigoni, German-Italian Centre for the European Dialogue


• DISCO — Dependency in Syntactic Covariance (Workshop on Phi-Agreement, Reference, and Case), 16–17 April 2019, at Leipzig University (as a part of the joint DFG project Anaphora vs Agreement: Investigating the Anaphor Agreement Effect between the University of Göttingen & the University of Leipzig)


• "Auf den Spuren der deutschen Sprachgeschichte und Literatur in Mitteldeutschland" (Workshops im Rahmen der U4 Kooperation), 10–12 April 2019, at Universität Göttingen


• Workshop: "New Horizons in the Study of Nominal Phrases", Annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2019), 6-8 March 2019, at University of Bremen

2018


• FDSL 13 (2018) – 13th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages, 5–7 December 2018, at Göttingen University


• CGSW33 (2018) – Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, 27–28 September 2018, at Göttingen University


• LinG1 (2018) – Workshop on Agreement and Anaphoricity, 25–26 September 2018, at Göttingen University


• Summer School "Form-Meaning Mismatches in Natural Language", 30 July – 10 August 2018, at Göttingen University


• "Ausgewählte Themen zu Phonologie und Phonetik" — Barbara Vogt (Triest), 16–20 July 2018, at Göttingen University


• Ambigo: Workshop on Ambiguity – Theory, Development, and Processing, 4–6 July 2018, at Göttingen University


• Workshop: "Große Korpora in der Praxis: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen" (Einführung in COSMAS II), 5–6 June 2018, at Göttingen University


• "Auf den Spuren der deutschen Sprachgeschichte und Literatur in Mitteldeutschland"
  
• GraModAT – Grammaticalization of Mood, Aspect and Tense, 26 February 2018

2017


• Anaphora Resolution in Sign and Spoken Languages - Theoretical and Experimental Dimensions (ARISAS), 20-21 February 2017


• GGS 2017 Generative Grammatik des Südens, 16-18 June 2017


• GÖTTINGEN SUMMER SCHOOL: HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS - WITH A FOCUS ON SPEECH ACTS AND SENTENCE TYPES, July 24 - August 4 2017

2016


• Workshop: Sign Language Agreement Revisited: New Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives, 23-26 February 2016


• GLOW 2016 - 39th Generative Linguistics in the Old World, 5-8 April 2016, at Göttingen University

2015


• Workshop on Sentence Types and Mood, 12 October 2015, at Göttingen University


• Workshop Nonmanuals at the Gesture Sign Interface (NaGSI), 9-10 October 2015, at Göttingen University


• Göttingen Spirit Summer School & Workshop on Negation, September 2015, at Göttingen University


• XPrag.de: Experimental Pragmatics, Annual Meeting, 25-27 June 2015, at Göttingen University

2014


• Sinn und Bedeutung 19, 15-17 September 2014, at Göttingen University


• Workshop: "New Approaches to the Syntax/Semantics Interface"
  
  The linguistics institute of the Department of German Philology and the Courant Research Centre "Text Structures" are organising a workshop on the syntax/semantics interface, sponsored by the U4 Network.
  
  For more Information please visit the German Department's website.


• Courant Research Center Conference - "Emotionsausdruck in Lyrik und Musik"
  
  organized by Tilmann Köppe and Christoph Dennerlein will take place on November 8th and 9th, 2013.
  
  For more information please have a look at the conference program.