Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar

General Linguistics Colloquium (WiSe 2025/2026)


Day, place: tuesdays, 16:15-17:45,
in presence at SPW 0.108, in zoom (registration in stud-ip, goettingen, for further details)
organized by Götz Keydana


28.10.2025. Start-up meeting


04.11.2025. no session


11.11.2025. Irina Lobzhanidze (Tbilissi):

Developing Digital Resources for Kartvelian Languages through Corpus Annotation toward UD Alignment


This presentation introduces the development of digital linguistic resources for Kartvelian languages, focusing on the integration of existing and emerging corpora for Georgian and Megrelian within a unified annotation and alignment framework. Georgian, the most widely spoken Kartvelian language, already possesses a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank, while Megrelian remains a severely under-resourced and endangered language with no previous computational resources. To bridge this gap, we present the Megrelian Corpus (XMF), a newly developed resource based on fieldwork data collected in Samegrelo, Georgia (2022–2024). The talk discusses shared challenges of corpus creation, lemmatisation, and UD alignment in agglutinative and morphologically rich Kartvelian languages. The presented resources lay the foundation for future UD-based modeling and cross-linguistic research within the Kartvelian family.

18.11.2025. no session


25.11.2025. no session


02.12.2025. Emir Yaray (Göttingen):

A Diachronic Look into Non-concatenative Morphology


This study examines the origins and mechanisms of non-concatenative morphology, a key feature of Semitic languages. Adopting a critical and comparative framework, it explores the historical development, phonological and grammaticalization processes, and cognitive motivations behind non-concatenative formations.

Eva Könings (Göttingen):

The Integration of English Loanwords into the Thai Tonal System


In this presentation, I examine how English, a non-tonal and stress-based language, is integrated into the tonal system of Thai through the adaptation of loanwords. Using a dataset of thirty English loanwords elicited from three native Thai speakers in controlled sentence contexts, I analyze how tones are assigned by combining auditory judgments with acoustic visualization. The results reveal systematic patterns, while at the same time, variation emerges, indicating that speakers’ English proficiency and perceptual factors shape tonal realization, suggesting that adaptation is not purely rule-governed. These findings refine earlier accounts (Gandour 1979; Bickner 1986; Kenstowicz & Suchato 2006) and highlight the flexible strategies Thai employs in incorporating foreign vocabulary. More broadly, this study contributes to our understanding of how stress-based and tonal prosodic systems interact and converge in situations of language contact and borrowing.

09.12.2025. Florian Fischer (Göttingen):

Linguistic Aspects of Old Turkic Runiform Writing


During the early middle ages the Turkic people of Central Asia used a script of their own making to write their language. This runiform script exhibits several unique properties that make it interesting for linguistic and philological studies. The Turkic runiform script has a plethora of contact scripts, yet no apparent precursor system. Therefore, it most likely constitutes a secondary invention. As such its inventors and users knowingly or unknowingly shaped it in accordance with their own intuitive linguistic knowledge. The structure and usage of the script show several features which directly relate to linguistic properties of the Old Turkic language. This can be seen in the sound values of letters, the inventory of letters and the usage of punctuation marks.

16.12.2025. Florian Ertz (Göttingen):

Number Interpretation in Yucatec Maya: A Case of Semantically Marked Plural? (Joint work with Robin Hollenbach and Stavros Skopeteas)


Cross-linguistically, it has been observed that in Morphology plurals tend to be marked and singulars unmarked, while in Semantics it is the singulars that express a more marked meaning, while the plural forms actually have number-neutral semantics, as can be seen in downward-entailing contexts. This is generally true for languages with obligatory number marking, but similar effects have also been observed in languages with optional or less strict number marking such as Turkish or Mandarin Chinese, where the non-plural-marked form would be expected to be semantically more general. We carried out two experiments on number interpretation in Yucatec Maya, a language with optional number marking, and our results could hint at a truly semantically marked plural form in this language. In the presentation, I will situate these findings within the broader research context, discuss their scope and reliability and identify directions of further research.

06.01.2026. Zhu Wen (Göttingen):

Tracking Grammaticalization through Prosody: The Case of German doch


This presentation examines the relationship between prosody and grammaticalization through the German modal particle doch. It investigates how prosodic weakening reflects different functional stages, focusing on conjunctional, adverbial, and modal particle uses, as well as the fixed cluster doch mal. Using naturally occurring spoken data, the analysis combines functional annotation and acoustic measurements (F0, duration, accent, boundary) to compare prosodic realizations across functions. The findings are expected to show a clear correlation between grammaticalization and prosodic reduction. This provides empirical evidence for prosody as a reliable diagnostic of grammaticalization.

13.01.2026. Edmund Boamah (Göttingen):

Study on the *Discommunication Between a Doctor and a Patient: A Case Study of Dental Care


This study investigates the communication challenges between doctors and patients in dental settings within the Oforikrom Municipality of Ghana. It focuses on how linguistic barriers and medical jargon create discommunication that affects the quality of care and understanding between health providers and patients. The research emphasizes the importance of translation and the use of indigenous languages, particularly Akan, to improve comprehension and trust in medical interactions. Through descriptive analysis of dental vocabulary, translation challenges, and an overview of dental tools and procedures, the study highlights how bridging language gaps can enhance patient outcomes and contribute to more culturally responsive healthcare delivery.

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20.01.2026. ..Ivona Ilic (Göttingen):

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27.01.2026. Ibrahim Alquran (Göttingen):

When Case Disappears: A Formal Account of Ditransitives in Levantine Arabic (لِـ, Fronting, and Resumptives)


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Khalil El-Boukili (Göttingen):

Word Order and Verb Movement in Modern Standard Arabic: A Syntactic Analysis


This presentation examines the intricate relationship between word order and verb movement in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language renowned for its rich morphological and syntactic complexity. Traditionally described as exhibiting a Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) order, Arabic nonetheless demonstrates significant flexibility in sentence structure, made possible by its robust system of case marking. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of scholars such as Mohammad, Fassi Fehri, and Ouhalla, this study explores how verb movement operates within the Arabic clause to establish tense, agreement, and information structure. By analyzing patterns of verb-subject agreement and the syntactic motivations behind verb movement to the Tense node, the presentation highlights the mechanisms through which Arabic maintains grammatical coherence while allowing for pragmatic and stylistic variation. Ultimately, this investigation reveals that Arabic’s apparent word order variability is not arbitrary but reflects a deeply systematic interaction between morphology, syntax, and meaning-offering valuable insight into the broader typology of verb-initial languages.

03.02.2026. Alejandra Villarreal Pazos (Göttingen):

A Challenge to Grammaticalization Theory: The Case of Spanish Dizque


This presentation provides an updated account of dizque in contemporary Spanish, showing how its current distribution challenges core principles of grammaticalization theory. The term, originating from the univerbation of diz que ("he/she says that..."), has traditionally been described as an adverb with epistemic or reportative meanings. However, our corpus-based analysis reveals that dizque is widely used across Latin American varieties also as an adjective, and even appears to have further developed into a prefix. Remarkably, we identify instances in which dizque functions as a verb -a usage that had disappeared from written records in the 17th century. We argue that this atypical trajectory constitutes a breach of the principle of unidirectionality, long regarded as the most basic tenet of grammaticalization.

10.02.2026. no session