Institut für Sprachwissenschaft

ISW Colloquium

Days : Monday | 16:00-17:15
Location : UniTobler F 012

Spring Semester 2026


Slot	Dates	Speaker	Title
1	23.02.	Jean Rohleder (UniBE, ISW)
2	02.03.	Dave Britain (UniBE, Anglistik)
3	16.03.	Tim Zingler (U Innsbruck)
4	23.03.	Wendy Lalhminghlui (UniBE, ISW)
5	13.04.	James Kirby (LMU München)
6	20.04.	Brigitte Pakendorf (CNRS-DDL)
7	04.05.	Erez Levon (UniBE, CSLS)
8	11.05.	Laura Becker (LMU München)

Fall Semester 2025


Slot	Dates	Speaker	Title
1	22.9.	Robin Meyer (Université de Lausanne)	The Armenian future tense(s): a diachronic and typological approach
2	29.9.	Cristian Juárez (ETHZ-GESS)	Traits of low-limit numeral systems and quantification in the Gran Chaco: Cognitive and contact effects
3	13.10.	Zakaria Muhammad (UniBE)	When eat means take: An account of the relationship between applicatives, causatives, and middles
4	20.10.	Luise Kempf (UniBE, Germanistik)	Sprachkontakt und Mehrsprachigkeit in Schweizer Familiennamen
5	03.11.	Borja Herce (Universität Zürich)	The effects of sound change vs analogy on paradigm complexity
6	17.11.	Katharina Gayler (Universität Köln)	Tone and intonation on the Bird’s Head: the case of Mpur
7	01.12.	Katrin Karl (ISSL, UniBE)	Tempus und Aspekt in narrativen Daten: Eine kontrastive Analyse zum Polnischen, Russischen und Deutschen
8	08.12.	Andrey Shluinsky (Humboldt Universität Berlin)	Approaching wordhood in understudied prefixing languages (hesitations and phonological evidence): The case of Akebu (< Ghana-Togo Mountain, Kwa)

Spring Semester 2025


Slot	Dates	Speaker	Title
1	24.2.	Mareike Wulff (U Sydney)	Interdisciplinary Language Documentation: Pig Slaughtering and other incidents among the Lhokpu speakers in Bhutan
2	10.3.	Pascal Gerber (UniBE, ISW)	The Importance of Being Buddhist – The Non-tibetospheric Profile of the Kiranti Languages
3	17.3.	Dagmar Jung (UZH, LiRI)	Classificatory verbs: acquisition and use in Dene Sųłıné
4	31.3.	Sergey Say (U Potsdam)	Genealogical and areal patterns in the distribution of bivalent valency class systems
5	7.4.	J Drew Hancock (UniBE, ISW)	Incorporation Processes and the Development of Trans-Mississippian Verb Stems
6	28.4.	Aimée Lahaussois (CNRS-HTL)	Interjection counting in Kiranti descriptions
7	12.5.	Giorgia Troiani (Nazarbayev U)	Testing the perception of Intonation Unit boundaries in naturally occurring conversation
8	19.5.	Sebastian Nordhoff (BBAW/LSP)	Open Text Collections

Fall Semester 2024


Slot	Date	Speaker	Title
1	23.09.	David Bradley (La Trobe)	The Phylogeny of Sino-Tibetan
2	07.10.	Uta Reinöhl (ALU Freiburg)	Lexical tone in Kera'a
3	14.10., 09:00 - 10:00	Gwendolyn Hyslop (U Sydney)
4	21.10.	Neige Rochant (UNIL)	Why do we need a prosodic clitic? Insights from Pukur.
5	28.10.	Julie Marsault (Sorbonne)	Diminutive consonantal shifts in Native North American languages with a focus on Umóⁿhoⁿ
6	11.11.	Adam Tallman (FSU Jena)	The sociolinguistic ecology of Idi-Agob multilingualism
7	18.11.	Sebastian Sauppe (UZH)	On grammar and processing: Exploring the link between language structure and cognition (and language acquisition)
8	09.12., 12:15-13:15 in B186, followed by an Apéro	Steven Moran & Tiena Danner (UniNE/ U Miami)	Type-ology is dead; or, The comparative method cannot tell us how languages evolve

Spring Semester 2024


Slot	Dates	Speaker	Title
1	26.02.	Stefan Schnell & Guido Linders (UZH)	Reference production across human languages
2	04.03.	Ilja Seržant (U Potsdam)	Towards a diachronic typology of DOM
3	18.03.	Hannah Hedegard (UniBE Anglistik)	Language Analysis in the Swiss Asylum System (LAITSAS): Towards Inclusive Collaboration and Best Practice
4	Mi 27.03.	Jeff Good (SUNY Buffalo)	Linguistic diversification across scales: Developing baseline assumptions for modeling language change in Bantu societies
5	08.04.	Katarzyna Janic (AMU Poznan)	Capturing form-function correlations in the domain of P demotion constructions: A semantic map approach
6	22.04.	Nadine Grimm (U Rochester)	Grammatical tone in the verb phrase of northwestern Bantu languages
7	29.04.	Linda Konnerth (UniBE)	SAP objects: Indexing and pronoun occurrence in two Trans-Himalayan languages
8	13.05.	Silvia Natale (UniBE Italianistik)	Progressive from a comparative perspective: Italian vs. (Swiss) German

Fall Semester 2023


Slot	Dates	Speaker	Title
1	25.09.	Sandra Auderset (UniBE)	Comprehensive database of sound changes reveals tree-like and wave-like processes in the Mixtec language family
2	09.10.	Fernando Zúñiga (UniBE)	Applicativizing preverbs in Germanic: English and German case studies
3	16.10.	Jocelyn Aznar	Is silence a linguistic sign? Basic Word Order, Silent Pauses, Speech Verbs and Interjecting in the production of Direct Speech
4	30.10.	Jeff Pheiff (UniBE GERM)	oooooh mein gott, es isch sooo geil! Lexical Variation in Adjective Intensification in (Swiss) German Dialects
5	06.11.	Chundra Cathcart (UZH)	Exploring the co-evolution of sound patterns and lexical items: a phylogenetic approach
6	20.11.	Jérôme Jacquin (UNIL)	Mixed Methods approaches in Corpus Pragmatics? A case study about Epistemic and Evidential Markers in French
7	27.11.	Pavel Ozerov (U Innsbruck)	Traditional concepts through the interactional prism: disentangling pragmatics and grammar into local communicative instructions
8	11.12.	John Mansfield (UZH)	Converging or diverging? Language history in what may be the world’s most diverse linguistic area