Blog CRC1646

Die „Sprachschmiede“. Das Citizen Science Sprachlabor des SFB 1646 ist online

2026-04-08T11:24:00+02:00

Die "Sprachschmiede" ist eine neue Web-Plattform zu linguistischen Phänomenen rund um sprachliche Kreativität in der Kommunikation. Sie wurde von Florian Kankowski, Doktorand im Projekt Ö, mitentwickelt. Die Projektleitung hat Prof. Dr. Oliver Bott. Sie soll es interessierten Bürger*innen ermöglichen, sich auf Augenhöhe an der Forschung im SFB zu beteiligen. Dabei ergänzt sie Projekte der partizipativen Sprachforschung, die der Praxis des Linguistic Landscaping folgen, indem Citizen Science Ansätze nun auch in der linguistischen Grundlagenforschung zum Einsatz kommen.

Das Besondere an der „Sprachschmiede“ ist ihr inhärent partizipatorischer Ansatz. Die Citizen Scientists können ihren Interessen nachgehen und an verschiedenen Stellen des wissenschaftlichen Prozesses mitwirken: von der Datenakquise durch Teilnahme an spielerisch gestalteten Experimenten über komplexere Analyseaufgaben bis hin zur Formulierung eigener Hypothesen, die sie gemeinsam mit den Forschenden in Forenbeiträgen diskutieren können. Im „Sprachblog“, dem hauseigenen Blog der Plattform, werden Ergebnisse aus Forschungsprojekten diskutiert und für die Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht.

Die Sprachschmiede macht sich zunutze, dass uns das Thema Sprache ständig umtreibt. Unabhängig davon, ob wir uns bewusst damit beschäftigen oder nicht, haben wir einen intuitiven Zugang dazu. Mit Hilfe der Plattform erfahren die Forschenden von implizitem sprachlichen Wissen, das sich auf diese Weise viel umfassender erforschen lässt als in einer klassischen Laborsituation, auf die psycholinguistische Studien üblicherweise ihre Daten stützen. Außerdem bietet sie viele Möglichkeiten, um für sprachliche Phänomene im Alltag zu sensibilisieren und Einblicke in wissenschaftliche Fragen und Methoden zu geben. Dabei wird das Mittel der Gamifizierung für die Gestaltung von Experimenten genutzt, ein Ansatz, der in der Wissenskommunikation zunehmend Anwendung findet. So können sich die Teilnehmenden auf der Plattform für verschiedene Spiele entscheiden.

Aktuell laufen zwei Citizen-Science-Projekte auf der Sprachschmiede: In „Mensch vs. Maschine“ begeben sich die Citizen Scientists auf eine Forschungsreise zum Thema KI-generierter Sprache. Dabei lernen sie in mehreren Quizzen, diese von menschlicher Sprache zu unterscheiden. Im digitalen Escape-Room „Verschollen im Nichts“ befassen sie sich dagegen mit sprachlicher Negationsverarbeitung. Hier werden aus Sprachexperimenten Sprachspiele und Rätsel, ohne ihren wissenschaftlichen Mehrwert einzubüßen.

Die Plattform wird laufend weiterentwickelt und mit neuen „Forschungsreisen“ rund um sprachliche Kreativität ergänzt.

Siehe hier auch die Pressemitteilung der Universität Bielefeld vom 8. April 2026.

Launch der "Sprachschmiede" im SFB Kolloquium, Foto: Sascha Hermannski © SFB 1646

Screenshot einer Aufgabe in der "Sprachschmiede"

oben links: Florian Kankowski, oben rechts: Oliver Bott.

unten: Team des Projekts ö

Fotos: Sascha Hermannski © SFB 1646

A Short Report of Research Stay at KU Leuven by Désirée Kleineberg (A06)

2026-03-06T07:41:48+01:00

From 12^th of November to 9^th of December 2025, the postdoctoral fellow Désirée Kleineberg from project A06 profited from the outgoing scholarships of CRC 1646 and seized the opportunity for a research stay at the KU Leuven (Belgium). She was hosted by the research group of Functional and Cognitive Linguistics (FunC). This research group investigates grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective, focusing on form-function relations, the general architecture of grammatical systems and diachronic evolution of grammatical constructions. With this research focus, the FunC group was a perfect match for Désirée’s research on the evolution of verbal periphrases in the Romance languages. In her current studies, she concentrates on the evolution of competition between various constructions which have the same function, and possible outcomes of those processes – in short: the question why some linguistic innovations are successful and others not.

During her stay, she had the opportunity to discuss her studies, the theoretical modelling and methodological questions with colleagues like Hendrik De Smet, Bert Cornillie, Anna Kisiel, or María Sol Sansiñena. The fact that we were able to welcome Hendrik De Smet to the Bielefeld colloquium just one week after Désriée's stay to give a lecture on "In language change, analogy is like gravity: omnipresent, weak and poorly understand" is proof that the connections between the CRC 1646 and our colleagues at the KU Leuven are manifold and exist in both directions. On the 18^th of December she presented the CRC and her work in the FunC-Colloquium (“On “failed” changes – The (rise and) decline of Fr. ”) and on the 3rd of December in a student’s course on language variation and change in French (“Évolution de la périphrase - Analyse des facteurs contextuels de son déclin du 15e au 18e siècle)”.

Luckily, there was also time to explore the beautiful historical city of Leuven, make some trips to nearby cities and to eat one or the other Belgian waffle!

After a month which was packed full with fruitful discussions, productive writing and some thorough reflections on theoretical concepts like competition, differentiation and success of linguistic creativity, Désirée came back full of inspiration and motivation to continue her work in project A06.

Central University Library, Foto: Désirée Kleineberg © SFB 1646

River Dijle at Groot Begijnhof, Foto: Désirée Kleineberg © SFB 1646

Désirée Kleineberg, Foto: Sascha Hermannski © SFB 1646

Project A06, Foto: Sascha Hermannski © SFB 1646

Hintere Reihe, v.l.n.r.: Barbara Job, Tanja Ackermann, Said Sahel

Vordere Reihe, v.l.n.r.: Rebekka von Legat, Désirée Kleineberg

Review: Ákos Buza (A03) on his Research Stay at the Phonetics Research Group in Budapest

2025-09-28T18:11:01+02:00

From 15^th to 17^th of July, Ákos Buza, PhD student at Project A03, had the opportunity to visit the Phonetics Research Group at the Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics of the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics (NYTK) in Budapest. During his time there, he recorded two speakers whose voices will serve as stimuli for his research, to help with the investigation into mismatches at the intersection of syntax, information structure, and prosody. The colleagues at the institute were incredibly helpful in setting up the phonetics studio to ensure Ákos captured high-quality audio.

This visit brought his project a step closer to gathering the data it needs, while also helping him to a better understanding of the prosodic patterns in his target sentences. In addition to this, Ákos was able to contribute to one of Budapest`s ongoing experiments by being recorded himself.

The visit was another step in the ongoing productive collaboration between Dr. Katalin Mády, head of the Research Group of Phonetics in Budapest, and the A03 project.

The Hungarian Research Center of Linguistics in Budapest

Control-room setup at the Hungarian Research Center for Linguistics in Budapest

Ákos Buza © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646

Is “Zorrk” the evil twin of “Lull”? Collaboration between Project A02 and Professor Christine Mooshammer (Berlin) launched

2025-09-09T15:56:22+02:00

We are excited to announce a collaboration between the A02 project of CRC1646 and professor Christine Mooshammer (Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). In her research, Christine Mooshammer investigates phonetics and phonology – including sound symbolism and phonaesthetics in constructed languages. She visited us at Bielefeld University last week for a very productive kick-off meeting and inspiring discussions on linguistic creativity and novel phonetic forms for naming fictional characters.

From left to right: Joana Cholin, Sina Zarrieß, Petrą Wagner, Leonie Schade, Christine Mooshammer, Daniel Duran

Conference Review: Project A02 Presented the First German BabyLM Corpus at CoNLL 2025 in Vienna

2025-08-26T21:53:34+02:00

A02 researchers Bastian Bunzeck, Daniel Duran and Sina Zarrieß attended the 29^th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2025) in Vienna from July 31 to August 1 and presented the world’s first German BabyLM corpus. CoNLL is one of the premier venues for work on theoretically grounded and cognitively motivated approaches to computational language learning (with an acceptance rate below 20%!).

As such, it fits directly with one of the main aims of A02 — creating computational models of creative pronunciation variation. To do so, however, first adequate data is needed. In a pioneer effort, Bastian, Daniel and Sina created a dataset of developmentally plausible training data in German. With this data, they investigated which linguistic structures a #BabyLM can learn from a relatively small amount of input data: Words? Syntax? Semantics? As it turns out, simpler child-directed language is conducive to lexical benchmarks, but less so for syntax.

During the poster presentation, Bastian, Daniel and Sina received inspiring feedback, especially as to ways in which such models could be made even more developmentally plausible — e.g. by incorporating raw speech signals instead of text. In sum, the general theme of CoNLL aligned perfectly with the work in A02, and new ideas about phonetic and phonological properties in language models led to interesting discussions with colleagues from Cambridge and Amsterdam.

Conference CoNLL 2025

Abstract of the Poster

Projekt A02

Bastian Bunzeck in Front of the Poster © Daniel Duran

Project A02 © Sascha Hermannski

Back row from left to right: Bastian Bunzeck, Joana Cholin, Leonie Schade & Daniel Duran

Front row from left to right: Petra Wagner & Sina Zarrieß

A Short Report of Research Stay at the CRC 1646 by Renuka Ozarkar (University of Mumbai)

2025-08-20T23:50:14+02:00

I have been on a short research stay at Bielefeld University during the 4th of May to the 28th of July, 2025 as part of the project A01: Creativity in (Morpho)syntactic Variation: the role of analogy. The project led by Prof. Dr. Jutta Hartmann and Dr. András Bárány, focuses on long-distance dependencies in languages, particularly long-distance movement and agreement. All aspects of morphosyntactic agreement, especially long-distance agreement, is my area of interest. Moreover, some phenomena such as adverbial agreement in Marathi (my native language) has been of my interest for some time. Particularly, the distribution of adverbial agreement shows patterns that are indicative of its spread in Marathi and other related language through analogical extension (perhaps a creative one). As such my interest areas seem to align with the project A01 perfectly. The project A01’s focus is also on experimental syntax, which is an area I wish to initiate into. So, with the aim of acquiring skills of syntactic experimentation to better understand the phenomena of agreement and long-distance dependencies in my language, I applied for a short research stay at Bielefeld University and subsequently joined the project A01 in May, 2025.

My three months long stay at the Bielefeld was certainly rich with interactions and learning experiences. As part of the project A01, I attended all of the group’s meetings as well as the meetings of the Current Research Group of General Linguistics. Through the colloquium lectures of the General Linguistics group as well as of the CRC, I got the opportunity to listen to several researchers in the field from various places. It was insightful overall to get a sense of the current and future directions in the field of language sciences. Interestingly, I was also invited to be part of the meetings of project A03 since one of the languages on the focal agenda of this group is Hindi, which I also work on. Interaction with this group was also equally stimulating.

As part of the project, I worked on two phenomena of agreement in Marathi: agreement in double-NP copular constructions and adverbial agreement. With the help of discussions with Prof. Hartmann, Dr. Bárány, Dr. Anke Himmelreich, Dr. Farhat Jabeen and the researchers Szilvia Dazcó, Fabian Zöfelt and Shravani Patil, I designed an experiment involving acceptability judgement task. During my stay here, I managed to set up an experiment and conduct a small pilot study (or a pre-study) and I am in the process of analysing the results. I am certain that even after I return to my work in India, our interactions and the collaborations with the project A01 will continue.

Overall the three months here were full of academic activities, including the Summer School in Linguistic Creativity and the Comparative Syntax conference. The work-life balance was great too, so that I could also enjoy the fun activities on campus and in the city. What I appreciated the most is the collaborative spirit in the CRC. Although, technically I was part of A01, my interactions stretched beyond this group alone. The General Linguistics group accommodated me easily amongst them and these interactions indicate promising start for continued collaborations in near future, which I am eagerly looking forward to engaging in. I would like to express many thanks to the entire CRC team for support me in every possible way.

Dr Renuka Ozarkar, Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Mumbai (India)

Link to Renuka Ozarkar at Mumbai

Link to the current call for Visiting Fellowships 2026

First RTG SFB 1646 & Friends Symposium in Bielefeld

2025-07-02T00:00:00+02:00

English version below

Am 2. April 2025 fand von 8 bis 16 Uhr das erste Friends Symposium der Research Training Group (RTG) des SFB 1646 an der Universität Bielefeld statt. Die Veranstaltung brachte ca. 30 Doktorand*Innen und Postdocs zusammen, um über ihre Forschung zu sprachlicher Kreativität zu diskutieren und sich untereinander zu vernetzen. Teilgenommen haben nicht nur Mitglieder aus der RTG, sondern auch von der Universität Paderborn und dem CITEC Bielefeld.

Eröffnet wurde das Programm mit der Keynote von Dr. Aleksandra Ćwiek vom Leibniz- Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin (ZAS), die unter dem Titel „The RISE of a PhD: Navigating Chaos, Crisis, and Success in Academia" stand. In ihrer Präsentation gab sie einen offenen Einblick auf die persönliche Seite ihrer PhD-Zeit, einschließlich guter Tipps, Einsichten und Inspirationen für diese besondere und herausfordernde Lebensphase. Damit setzte sie den Ton für das gesamte Symposium, das auf Austausch, konstruktives Feedback und gegenseitige Unterstützung angelegt war. Für genügend Gelegenheiten zu persönlichen Gesprächen sorgten mehrere längere Kaffeepausen, bei denen es eine große Auswahl selbstgemachter Kuchen zu probieren gab sowie ein Lingo Bingo, in dem die Teilnehmenden Funfacts übereinander austauschten, um sich besser kennenzulernen.

Das Programm bestand darüber hinaus aus einer Reihe von Präsentationen von PhDs und PostDocs, die den fachlichen Austausch zwischen den Teilnehmenden ermöglichten. Das Thema der Präsentationen konnte frei gewählt werden, wobei dem anschließenden Feedback von den Peers besondere Bedeutung beigemessen wurde. Alexandra Filimonova (C04), Bastian Bunzeck (A02), Patricia Linnemann (B04) und Alon Fishman (C02) nutzten die Gelegenheit, um auf diese Weise mit ihren Kolleg*innen in den Austausch zu treten. Ihre Vortragsthemen reichten von den Besonderheiten eines SFB, den Herausforderungen bei der Übersetzung kreativer Ausdrücke, der Verwendung von LLMs zur Kreativitätsforschung über verschiedene Ideen zur kummulativen Promotion bis zu eigenständigen Forschungsprojekten, für deren Vorstellung man ansonsten selten einen Rahmen findet. Die Beiträge lieferten Einblicke in laufende Forschungen im SFB und regten darüber hinaus zu fruchtbarer Diskussion in angenehmer Atmosphäre an.

Am Ende waren sich alle einig, dass es eine zweite Auflage des Symposiums geben soll. Gelegenheit zum weiteren Austausch bietet auch die Sommerschule, die jährlich vom SFB organisiert wird. In der diesjährigen Auflage, die vom 21. – 25. Juli in Bielefeld stattfindet, sind für Kurzentschlossene noch vereinzelt Plätze frei.

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On April 2nd 2025, from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., the first “CRC1646 & Friends Symposium“ took place at Bielefeld University. The event brought together more than 30 PhDs & PostDocs to connect with each other and discuss their research on language and creativity. We were very happy to welcome also CRC-external participants, for example from the University of Paderborn or the CITEC Bielefeld.

The symposium started with a keynote from Dr. Aleksandra Ćwiek (ZAS Berlin) that was called “The RISE of a PhD: Navigating Chaos, Crisis, and Success in Academia”. She presented the personal side of her own PhD journey to us, offering lots of valuable insights, tips and inspiration that we can surely use in this special and challanging phase in our lives. With her open talk, she already set the tone for the whole symposium, which aimed at personal exchange, constructive feedback and support. Long coffee breaks offered plenty opportunities to talk to each other, as well as a buffet of tasty self-baked cake and a Lingo Bingo where participants exchanged funfacts about themselves to get to know each other

In addition, the one-day program included a series of presentations by PhDs and PostDocs, enabling also professional exchange of information between the participants. The topic of the presentations could be freely chosen, and particular importance was given to the subsequent feedback from the peers. Alexandra Filimonova (C04), Bastian Bunzeck (A02), Patricia Linnemann (B04) and Alon Fishman (C02) took the opportunity to exchange ideas with their colleagues. Their presentation topics ranged from specifics of the work in the CRC, such as the challenges of translating creative expressions or the use of LLMs for creativity research, to various ideas for a cumulative thesis, or even independent individual research projects, that might not be given space for presentation elsewhere. The contributions thus provided insights into the ongoing work in the CRC and beyond and stimulated a fruitful discussion in a pleasant atmosphere.

In the end, everyone agreed that there should be a second edition of the symposium. Our annual summer schools offer the chance for further exchange. This years school, taking place from 21-25th July in Bielefeld, has some last minute spots open.

Research Training Group des SFB 1646

Summer School der RTG