Blog CRC1646

From 29 to 30 April the GAKT-Workshop (Germanistische Linguistik zwischen Köln und Tokio) took place for the first time on the premises of the CRC 1646 at Bielefeld University, which is why this event became GAKT-BI this year. The workshop was also a collaboration of two linguistic CRCs in Germany. Arndt Riester from the CRC 1646 Linguistic Creativity in Communication at Bielefeld University, Klaus von Heusinger from the CRC 1252 Prominence in Language at Cologne University and Yoshiki Mori from the University of Tokyo organised the event.

As part of the workshop, thirteen doctoral students and other researchers from Bielefeld, Cologne and Japan had the opportunity to present their work on the topic of “Creativity and Interpretation” to a broader audience. Selected linguistic phenomena in Japanese and German were analysed in terms of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, while several CRC members took the role of commentators. Fitting the collaborative spirit of the GAKT-workshop series some of the presentations were the result of long-lasting cooperations between Japan and Germany. In total, there were ten talks.

For example, Katsumasa Ito (Osaka Metropolitan University) and Heiko Seeliger (CRC 1252, projekt A06, C10) jointly presented their thoughts on the semantics and pragmatics of the German expressions "Und ob!" and "Als ob!". They explained, for example, why the two expressions mark the obviousness of the truth or, respectively, the falsity of a statement. Nori Hayashi (University of Tokyo) presented his ideas on the “Polarity asymmetry under possibility modality and attention pragmatics”. He is currently a guest researcher in CRC 1646 project B03.

Several members of the CRC 1646 participated in the workshop, either as presenters or as commentators. Eleonore Laubenstein and Robert Lange, members of project A04 in the CRC 1646 were commented by Anke Himmelreich (CRC 1646, associated member in project B03). In their joint talk titled “To agree or not to agree. Kongruenzkonflikte bei Disjunktionen im Deutschen“, they investigated the creative potential of disjunctive subjects in sentences such as “Du oder ich mach-en/-st/-e das”. Fabian Zöfelt, another member of the CRC 1646 (project A01) presented his work with the title “Wenn wir es nur wüssten. Syntaktische Ambiguität von und Extraktion aus wenn-Sätzen”. Among other things he discussed the ambiguos syntactic status of some “wenn”-clauses, followed by a comment by Jutta Hartmann (CRC 1646, project A01, B03). Mariya Hristova (project B04) presented her work on creative multiword expressions in doctor-patient conversations. She demonstrated the processes involved when negotating the meaning and usability of creative expressions with the example “durcheinanderer Mensch”. Deeply tied to the topic of linguistic creativity, her presentation was fittingly commented by another member of the CRC 1646 (Torgrim Solstad, project B01)

The empirical study and language comparison by Timo Buchholz (CRC 1252) were commented by Jana Häussler (CRC 1646, A04). His talk with the title “Effects of subordination on anaphor resolution in Japanese and German” dealt with the the extent to which syntactic, punctuational and discourse-structural characteristics of sentences influence how anaphors are interpreted – and whether there are differences between Japanese and German in this respect. As another example of the scientific exchange between Bielefeld and Tokyo, two of the organisers gave a joint presentation. Yoshiki Mori, cooperation partner of project B03, and Arndt Riester presented how different yes-no questions are formulated in Japanese and which contextual factors influence their acceptability.

On the evening of the first day of the workshop, a tribute was paid to the recently retired Prof. Dr Yoshiki Mori, who has been committed to German-Japanese exchange in German linguistics for over 40 years, by way of organising conferences, inviting German academics to Japan and serving on the international advisory board of the IDS (Institut für Deutsche Sprache) Mannheim. All in all, the 9^th outing of the GAKT-Workshop series proved to be a great opportunity for young researchers to build and strengthen international connections between Japan and Germany.

The participants of GAKT-BI © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646

v.l.n.r.: Yoshiki Mori (University of Tokyo), Arndt Riester (CRC 1646, B03),

Klaus von Heusinger (CRC 1252 Köln, C04) © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646

Yoshiri Mori (University of Tokyo) © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646