News 2016

The Göttingen Sign Team wishes a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!


Christmas Party 2016
Once again, the yearly Christmas party of our "Gebärdentreff" took place on 6th of December with mulled wine, punch and degrees below zero. We spent a cozy evening in a large round of many flying hands, eating, drinking, and chatting along happily. We are looking forward to seeing a lot of new and familiar faces at the first Gebärdentreff of the new year on January 10th.





Congresso Nacional de Pesquisas em Linguistica de Linguas de Sinais
Over 800 deaf and hearing participants visited the Congresso Nacional de Pesquisas em Linguistica de Linguas de Sinais, which took place from November 28-30 at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil. The SignTeam Göttingen took part with two invited presentations, one workshop and a poster presentation. We were really impressed by the warm hospitality and the inspiring and inspirational scientific exchange during the conference - not to speak about the wonderful weather and the good food.



Dr. Annika Hübl finished her PhD!!!
CONGRATULATIONS! In October 2016, Annika successfully defended her dissertation. Her dissertation deals with different forms of reported speech in sign languages and particularly with the modality-specific phenomenon of role-shift. She analyzes indexicals (I, you, here, now) in quoted utterances and compares those 'hybrid' forms of reported speech with different quotative analyses suggested for spoken languages. The day of her defense was a huge success with a lot of fun. And as we can see, Annika followed the Göttingen tradition and kissed the Gänseliesl. We all celebrate with her!





International Sign and American Sign Language
The Sign Team Göttingen invited two deaf professionals to learn more about International Sign and American Sign Language (ASL). Our workshop took place September, 26-30 2016. In the first three days, Sujit Sahasrabudhe took us on a multilingual journey and showed us the use of International Sign and various communication strategies that help us to communicate with people using different sign languages.


The following two days, Pinky Gehrcke taught us American Sign Language (ASL) and we learned many ASL signs. At international conferences, ASL is used more and more as the scientific language of academia and therefore we now have to practice further to enable barrier-free communication in the future. Both courses were fantastic and we had a lot of fun.






FEAST conference 2016 and SignHub Meeting in Venice
Many of the SignTeam went to the FEAST conference in Venice to present recent work in two talks and two posters. It was a wonderful and very successful workshop and the city was amazing as usual. Part of the group stayed for two more days to work in the SignHub Meetings of the European project Horizon 2020, where representatives of the participating countries from Italy, France, Spain, Island, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Germany fruitfully discussed future work.

New research project "(In)visible Life Stories"
The federal state of Lower Saxony is funding a new research project on the documentation of the life stories of elderly deaf people in the program PRO*Niedersachsen. 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 Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. 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. More information here.

Sign Theatre Project "Mal wieder Grimm"
More information: sign theatre project in Göttingen



Conference "Gesture - Creativity - Multimodality" of the ISGS in Paris
The sign language team took part in the 7th conference of the ISGS (International Society for Gesture Studies). This event took place in Paris, July 18-22, 2016. There were interesting talks and posters on gesture and sign language studies as well as nice weather, good food and many flying hands. We spent a wonderful and exciting week there and return to Göttingen with a lot of new insights.







Handbook "Laut, Gebärde, Buchstabe" has been published
The new Handbook "Handbuch Laut, Gebärde, Buchstabe" (Handbook Sound, Sign, Letter) edited by Ulrike Domahs and Beatrice Primus has been published. The handbook pursues a completely new idea - in detailed review articles, experts from different fields describe various phonological categories from a modality-specific perspective. The SignTeam Göttingen has contributed four articles on the following topics: syllable, prosody, language change, and language processing in sign languages. More information here.








The Göttingen Sign Team goes canoeing
For this years staff outing, we went canoeing on the river Leine quite close to Göttingen. The river winds through a beautiful landscape with bushes and trees hanging over the water, which gave us a pretty djungle-like impression. The 20 km section went from Greene to Alfeld and let us feel our muscles even during the next day. But, the wonderful weather and our yummy picnic will be remembered much longer.



Annual meeting of the priority program XPrag.de in Tübingen
Our sign language team presented the first exciting results of a new ERP study on anaphora resolution and the interpretation of R-loci in DGS at the annual meeting of the priority program XPrag.de in Tübingen.









Symposium on "Translanguaging and repertoires across signed and spoken languages: Insights from linguistic ethnographies in (super)diverse contexts"
The symposium on "Translanguaging and repertoires across signed and spoken languages: Insights from linguistic ethnographies in (super)diverse contexts" organized by Annelies Kusters will take place in Göttingen, June 20-21 2016. It will be live-streamed. More information here.

The RTG 2070 "Understanding Social Relationships", the CRC "Text Structures" and Linguistics in Göttingen (LinG) jointly invite you to a talk by Irene Mittelberg on "Crossmodal meaning construction: Gestures as mediators between linguistic structure and pragmatics".
Date: Wednesday, May 11th at 14:30 at the RTG 2070 Colloquium.
Location: CRC Text structures, Nikolausberger Weg 23, Library 2nd floor.

Screening and Discussion of the film "Ishaare - Gestures and Signs in Mumbai"
On 3rd of May 2016 at 11:00-13:00, the documentray fim "Ishaare - Gestures and Signs in Mumbai" directed by Dr. Annelies Kusters will be presented and discussed in the library hall of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Herrmann-Föge-Weg 11).









Workshop "Sign language agreement revisited: new theoretical and experimental perspectives ", February 23-26, 2016, University of Konstanz
Research in the last 30 years has shown that agreement in sign languages differs in interesting ways from agreement in spoken languages. It has been shown that agreement in sign language is subject to grammatical restrictions. At the same time, its gestural basis and typological uniformity have questioned the grammatical status of agreement in sign language. This workshop aims at expanding our understanding on agreement in sign languages in particular and natural languages in general through different typological, experimental, corpus-based, and theoretical approaches.

New Video about XPrag-project "SignRef"

New video on experimental pragmatics in sign language introducing the XPrag-project "SignRef" at Göttingen University. Subtitles are available in German and English. Please use video player settings to change it!


SignGes - a new Competence Center for Sign Language and Gesture opens at the RWTH University of Aachen
The opening event organized by the SignGes competence center of the RWTH University of Aachen addresses the two multimodal communication forms sign languages and gesture. The focus of the interdisciplinary lectures is on the impact of gestures and sings for cultural communication. New research projects investigating the relation between signs and gestures as well as their differences in use and structure will be presented.
Here you will find the lectures as videos.

The SignTeam in Melbourne!
The sign language team again took part in the TISLR conference (Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research), the biggest sign language conference worldwide. The event took place from January 4th - 7th 2016 in Melbourne/Australia. The long way downunder to the other side of the world was worth while. It was a wonderful start of the new year with exciting talks, interesting posters and a lot of nice meetings with wonderful people.