Linguistics in Göttingen - A platform for empirical and theoretical linguistics

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The aim of this project is to systematically record, document, evaluate, protect, and analyze the comprehensive linguistic and cultural heritage of elderly deaf people in Germany by interviewing deaf people in Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. The project guarantees systematic data elicitation, the digital archiving of videos, professional annotation, and scientific evaluation of the life stories of elderly deaf people from a historical perspective including social sciences, cultural studies, and linguistics. This video documentation of sign language interviews is of crucial importance to understand the culture and language of a specific minority in our region. Due to the lack of a written system, individual life stories of elderly deaf people would be inevitably lost with their death, thus, running the risk of losing the culture and language of a whole generation from our cultural memory. In this project, 16 deaf people from the age of 70 in Niedersachsen and Sachsen-Anhalt will be interviewed about various relevant biographical aspects using guideline-based structured interviews. In particular, it is the historical topics concerning East- and West Germany, issues about gender-specific differences, and the problematic social situation of a language minority that show the unique value of these life stories of deaf people. The experimental SignLab at the University of Göttingen provides an excellent basis for professional data elicitation as well as skilled data analysis. The data will not only be evaluated with respect to linguistic indicators that allow conclusions about grammatical and pragmatic aspects, language change, grammaticalization, and language variation but also about the social and cultural background of deaf people in Germany. These stories of the lifetimes of elderly deaf people thus also illustrate how history and society are experienced and handled by members of the deaf community. These life stories video-recorded in an endangered language offer an invaluable insight and provide a corpus for pursuing scientific investigations in social sciences, cultural studies, as well as in the fields of linguistics and history. Apart from long-term data storage, the project will make selected video data available to academia but also to the public. Signed stories will be published on a trilingual barrier-free internet platform including subtitles and feedbackoptions to give the public access to this extremely precious cultural heritage. In addition, the data will provide the basis for a touring exhibition that presents selected examples of these stories to the general society. ​

Funding: PRO*Niedersachsen (Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur)

Runtime: 2017-2020

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The project "The Sign Hub: Preserving, Researching and Fostering the Linguistic, Historical and Cultural Heritage of European Deaf Signing Communities with an Integral Resource" aims to provide the first comprehensive response to the societal and scientific challenge resulting from generalized neglect of the cultural and linguistic identity of signing Deaf communities in Europe. It will provide an innovative and inclusive resource hub for the linguistic, historical and cultural documentation of the Deaf communities' heritage and for sign language assessment in clinical intervention and school settings. To this end, it will create an open state-of-the-art digital platform with customized accessible interfaces. The project will initially feed that platform with core content in the following domains, expandable in the future to other sign languages: digital grammars of 6 sign languages, produced with a new online grammar writing tool; an interactive digital atlas of linguistic structures of the world's sign languages; online sign language assessment instruments for education and clinical intervention, and the first digital archive of life narratives by elderly signers, subtitled and partially annotated for linguistic properties. These components, made available for the first time through a centralized platform to specialists and to the general public, will (a) help explore and value the identity and the cultural, historical and linguistic assets of Deaf signing communities, (b) advance linguistic knowledge on the natural languages of the Deaf and (c) impact on the diagnosis of language deficits within these minorities. SIGN-HUB will thus contribute to the dissemination and reuse of those assets in broader contexts, as part of European identity. The project is a critical attempt to rescue, showcase and boost that largely unknown part of our common heritage, as well as to ultimately enhance the full participation of Deaf citizens in all spheres of public life on an equal footing with hearing citizens. ​

Funding: EU (Horizon 2020)

Runtime: 2016-2020

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This DGF-funded project investigates the meaning of past tense morphology,. It concentrates on phenomena in which the semantic contribution of past tense appears to vary according to the syntactic context in which it occurs. For instance, the usage of past tense morhology in counterfactual conditionals ('if I were ill now, ...'), Sequence-of-Tense phenomena ('Mary thought that Bill left'), where the second past tense morpheme does not induce a new past tense. The project will specifically look at the cross-linguistic variation and interaction of such phenomena. More information about the project can be found here. The project is a joint colaboration with ZAS Berlin. ​

Funding: by the DFG

Runtime: 2016-2020

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Joint project, funded by the Volkswagen foundation, with the Hebrew University Jerusalem (Luka Crnič, and Ivy Sichel) on the syntactic and semantic behavior of negative indefinites cross-linguistically. It's main objectives are: (i) to explore the variation in the distribution of n-words across languages, which involves discoveringand properly characterizing the parameters of variation; (ii) to provide a formal account of this variation, which involves a detailed evaluation of the differentapproaches to n-words; and (iii) to situate this account within a more general theory of expressions whose distribution is sensitiveto the ‘polarity’ of the clause in which they occur (positive polarity items; NPIs; negative markers,expletive negation; etc). ​

Funding: by the Volkswagen foundation

Runtime: 2016-2020

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The Volkswagen Foundation awarded this book project with an Opus Magnum grant. The grant is intended for a 1.5 year replacement to write a monograph on negation and negative dependencies. Short summary: Every language is able to express negation. However, languages differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Some languages, like German, employ a single word (nicht); in other languages a single negative sentence may contain more than one negative word. In Italian Non telefona nessuno (not calls nobody) means 'nobody calls'. Negation is indissolubly connected to the phenomenon of negative and positive polarity. Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are items, like English 'ever', that may only appear in sentences that in some sense count as negative. NPIs surface in various kinds. Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) form the mirror image of NPIs. These are elements, such as English 'rather', that are banned from appearing in negative sentences. These phenomena, as well as a number of other, related phenomena, call for an explanation. However, whereas each of these phenomena have all been analysed in various ways, no single theory has ever been presented that offers an overarching explanation to all these phenomena in the domain of negation and negative dependencies. The book that I aim to write will present such an overarching perspective, based on novel data from language variation, language acquisition and language change. ​

Funding: The Volkswagen Foundation awarded this book project with an Opus Magnum grant.

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The project "Anaphora vs. Agreement: Investigating the Anaphor Agreement Effect", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) has been running from June 2016 and will end soon in early 2020. It is concerned with investigating the interaction between nominal anaphora and phi-agreement on its clausemate verb across a variety of languages. For more information, including a detailed project description

Funding: by the DFG.

Runtime: 01.06.2016 - 2020

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The project explores long-distance dependencies, especially in interrogative and relative constructions, using two grammatical frameworks (HPSG and the Minimalist Program). In a first step, the data situation will be improved through corpus analyses and inquiries with native speakers. This will yield, for the first time, a broad empirical and theoretical coverage and a maximally complete description of long-distance dependencies in French, an area that has been only fragmentarily described up to now. The overreaching objective of the project is to answer the question of how complex, numerous and construction-specific the elements of syntactic description must be in order to explain the phenomena contained in a broad sample of data that show long-distance-dependencies in French. The selected frameworks present two extreme poles of possible interpretations. The Minimalist Program requires modeling by means of atomic units (lexical entries with head status), which interact with very general syntactic principles of a very local range. Similarly to what is claimed by construction grammar, HPSG has expanded the term lexicon and can formulate, if necessary, complex description units in which larger constellations and the range of constraints are already defined. In an interpretation within Construction Grammar, this can lead to the formulation of a construction family, as required in Sag (2010). At the end of the project funding period, a detailed comparison of the two analyses is planned to be available.

Funding: by the DFG.

Runtime: 01.10.2015 - 30.09.2018

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The phenomenon of projection of semantic content (henceforth: projective content, PC) has attracted much attention throughout the past ten years, both in terms of theoretical discussions and concerning psycholinguistic experimentation. This resulted in much finer grained distinctions between different types of PC. However, the discussion of the heterogeneity of PC has been largely determined by data stemming from introspective use of a number of operational tests like the “Hey, wait a minute”-test, and other types of off-line data. Our project aims at gaining a better understanding of the temporal sequence of processing steps and the nature of the representations involved in the comprehension of sentences containing PC triggers. To this end, we investigate the interaction of the effects of different types of PC (definite descriptions, expressives, and focus particles) with well-established lexical and syntactic effects, using a variety of methods ranging from offline questionnaires to eye-tracking during reading. Our contribution to the larger XPrag.de enterprise lies in the systematic validation and expansion of the methodological toolkit, as well as in providing the discussion on the heterogeneity of PC with a new type of data.

Funding: by the DFG.

Runtime: 2014-2017

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The objective of the research project is to develop a theory of the linguistic structure and neuro-cognitive processing of anaphoric relations and discourse referents in sign language based on empirical data from German Sign Language (DGS). The project focuses on a characteristic of sign languages which is directly linked to the modality-specific realization of morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic categories in the three-dimensional signing space: Sign languages actively use the geometrical properties of the signing space to establish discourse referents and disambiguate anaphoric relationships in a way which is alien to oral-auditory languages. The objective of the proposed research project is a theory of the linguistic structure and cognitive processing of anaphoric relations and discourse referents in sign language that is based on empirical and experimental data. On the one hand, this will contribute to the understanding of an under-studied language in the visual-gestural modality. On the other hand, it will also broaden our knowledge of the human language faculty in general and will provide new insights into the influence of modality on linguistic structure.

Funding: by the DFG.

Runtime: 2014-2017

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This project investigates two historically related sign languages, German Sign Language (DGS) and Israeli Sign Language (ISL). The project aims to improve our understanding of the form and function of the prosodic systems used in the two sign languages and its interaction with other levels of grammar. It will investigate the distribution and the historical development of different non-manual markers and their integration with the manual (lexical) signal on the basis of data elicited with signers in both sign languages. For the historical dimension, different age groups in each sign language will be compared to each other. In addition, by comparing the grammatical properties of these non-manuals to structures with similar functions in spoken languages like Hebrew, German or English, the project also will contribute to a better understanding of the modality-specific and modality-independent aspects of the prosodic system and of the human language faculty in general. Hence, this a typologically and theoretically innovative project, both because very little comparative historical work has been done across sign languages generally, and because the linguistic structures of the two specific languages we will study have not been systematically compared to each other despite the clear historical relation between them. In addition, testing different generations will shed light on the diachronic development of these languages, since people’s grammars tend to stabilize after the critical period (Labov 1963). Furthermore, the results will be highly significant for spoken language research on intonation and the interfaces between prosody, syntax and semantics/pragmatics and provide insights into the computational system of language(s).

Funding: The German Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF)

Runtime: 2013-2015

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Language policies for signing deaf Europeans require reliable reference grammars of their sign languages (SLs), which are generally lacking or of limited validity if they exist. They constitute the basis for teaching and training purposes. In addition, descriptive grammars are essential for the documentation of a European linguistic and cultural heritage which is largely unrecognized to date. Making SL grammars available to signing communities, policy makers, linguists and to civil society in general will strengthen the status of SLs and support full participation of their users in society. In parallel, deepening the knowledge on SL grammars with a theoretically informed comparative approach will contribute to the characterization of the human faculty of language, whose study is severely biased towards spoken languages. In this way, empirical and theoretical results from SLs will have an impact on several domains of the current agenda of Cognitive Sciences. This COST Action aims to develop the first European network to design a blueprint for those reference grammars, which are indispensable tools.

Funding: EU (COST Action)

Runtime: 2011-2015

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