The Konstanz semantics community is frequently enriched by visitors from various places all over the world, from senior researchers to visiting PhD students. Some stay for a few days, some for a few months, most come more than once.

Upcoming visitors

  • Aviv Schoenfeld, Tel Aviv University.
    October 2, 2019 – February 28, 2020
    Aviv is a PhD student at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Fred Landman, working on the interface between three fundamental topics in the semantics of nouns and noun phrases: reference to kinds, plurality and countability (the count-mass distinction). He will be visiting Konstanz in order to work with Maribel Romero.

Past visitors

  • Laura Devlesschouwer, Universiteit Antwerpen & Université Libre de Bruxelles.
    July 14 – 17, 2019
    Laura is a PhD student (FWO candidate) in Belgium. Her research focusses on scalar implicatures, a topic of (in)direct interest for many researchers at the Universität Konstanz. On Monday the 15th July at 1.30 p.m., Laura gave a SuP talk entitled A new look at Grice’s (1975) ‘Logic and Conversation’ and she met with members of the lakeside comunity the next day.

  • Tyler Peterson, Arizona State University.
    July 8 – 13, 2019
    Tyler Peterson (Arizona State) visited Konstanz from July 7 to 14 as part of the Zukunftkolleg’s Mentorship Program (with Natasha Korotkova). He got his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2010 and his work focuses on documentation, revitalization, and maintenance of endangered Indigenous languages, primarily in the Americas and Oceania. His theoretical interests span various topics at the interface of semantics and pragmatics, including modality, evidentiality, causatives, mirativity and the language of surprise more generally. On July 12, he presented some of his research on evidentiality in Gitksan, an endangered language of British Columbia.

  • Kjell Johan Sæbø, Universitetet i Oslo.
    February 18 – March 1, 2019
    Kjell Johan (still) needs no introduction. He visited the lakeside community again, after his visit the previous year. We were very happy to have im back, to continue the many inspiring conversations begun then, to discover new connections, and to continue strengthen the Oslo-Konstanz semantics link.

  • Yurie Hara, Waseda University.
    January 23 – 26, 2019
    Yurie is a guest associate professor at the Research Institute for Science and Engineering at Waseda University, and her work spans many topics at the semantics/pragmatics interface. During her visit in Konstanz, which was organized by Project P5 of FOR2111, she gave a talk at the Linguistics Department Colloquium, entitled Japanese modalized questions: their prosody and levels of meaning (Thu, January 24, 3:15pm, G-307) and also was a guest in the Research Colloquium on Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics (Wed, January 23, 5pm, G-306), where the participants discussed Yurie’s newest work on the Japanese sentence-final particle darou in questions.

  • Anastasia Giannakidou, University of Chicago.
    September 19–22, 2018
    Anastasia is Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. She has worked on a variety of topics at the syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics interface. She visited Konstanz with a Zukunftskolleg Mentorship grant to work with Andreas Trotzke.

  • Laura Vela-Plo, University of the Basque Country.
    April 16 – June 30, 2018
    Laura is a PhD student in syntax-semantics at the University of the Basque Country. Her work concentrates on the syntax-semantics interface, more specifically, on the expression of comparison and degree constructions. During her stay in Konstanz, she mainly worked with Maribel Romero.

  • Muriel Assmann, University of Vienna.
    July 2–3, 2018
    Muriel is a PhD student at the University of Vienna in the Unalternative Semantics research group, working on focus marking in Wolof and Hausa. For her thesis, she focusses on contrastive topic in French and Brazilian Portugese. She visited Konstanz to exchange ideas with various department members and to give a talk at ’SuP.

  • Izabela Jordanoska, University of Vienna.
    July 2–3, 2018
    Izabela is a PhD student at the University of Vienna, and also a member of the Unalternative Semantics group, working on focus marking in Wolof and Hausa. Her thesis is about information structure-related discourse markers in Wolof. During her stay in Konstanz, she worked with various department members, and to give a ’SuP talk.

  • Kyle Rawlins, Johns Hopkins University.
    June 25 – 27, 2018
    Kyle is Associate Professor at the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has worked on the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals, questions, adverbs and modifiers. He was visiting Konstanz with a grant from the Young Scholar Fund to work with María Biezma and Arno Goebel.

  • Tharanga Weerasooriya, University of Ottawa.
    June 25 – 26, 2018
    Tharanga’s projects span a variety of topics such as positive polarity items, exhaustivity and ignorance approached from semantic as well as pragmatic perspectives. He extended his visit in Konstanz for SALA 34 to work with Maribel Romero and Erlinde Meertens.

  • Xavier Villalba, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
    June 11 – 15, 2018
    Prof. Villalba, who was visiting the Linguistics department under the auspices of the Erasmus exchange program, has worked on various topics in syntax, semantics and pragmatics, often with a focus on Romance languages. During his visit, he gave several talks (details on the events page).

  • David Rey, University of Barcelona.
    May 23–25, 2018
    David Rey is a philosopher of language with a strong interest in formal semantics at the LOGOS center at the University of Barcelona. His current research focusses on tenses and temporal adverbs in English. David will gave a talk in the Interdisciplinary Logic Colloquium: Towards an Intensional Account of Tenses.

  • Kajsa Djarv, University of Pennsylvania.
    May 22 – 23, 2018
    Kajsa is a Ph.D student at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on a variety of topics that intersect with the research interests of many linguists at Konstanz, including factivity, presuppositions, the syntax/semantics of embedding verbs, discourse structure and evidentiality. During her visit, she gave a ’SuP talk on Factivity: Evidential Inferences and Truth Projection, and met with members of the lakeside semantics community to exchange ideas and discuss current and future research projects.

  • Annie Zaenen and Lauri Karttunen, Stanford University.
    May 16 – 19, 2018
    Lauri and Annie need no introduction to semanticists and syntacticians alike. Annie will gave a talk in the Linguistics Department Colloquium. Besides this, the two met with members of the Konstanz linguistics community.

  • Dan Goodhue, École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
    May 7–8, 2018
    Dan is a recent graduate from McGill university, with a dissertation on On asking and answering biased polar questions. During his visit in Konstanz, he met with various members of the semantics/pragmatics community, and gave two talks: Epistemic bias and high negation questions and The knowledge account of epistemic modals.

  • Shin-Sook Kim, University of York.
    March 7 – March 11, 2018
    Shin-Sook Kim (PhD in Linguistics, University of Frankfurt) is a former member of the SFB 471 (Variation und Entwicklung im Lexikon) in Konstanz. She specialises in comparative syntax and the syntax-semantics interface.
    Shin-Sook is a guest of FOR 2111: Questions at the Interfaces, P5: Self-addressed questions. During her visit, she will cooperate with P5 on the topic of self-addressed questions in Korean and Japanese.

  • Prof. Kjell Johan Sæbø, Universitetet i Oslo.
    February 22 – March 7, 2018
    Kjell Johan needs no introduction. During his visit, which was supported through the Mentorship program of the Zukunftskolleg, he exchanged ideas with, and consulted on the research projects of, various members of the Konstanz semantics community. He also gave a talk, entitled Knowledge How and Knowledge That: Linguistic evidence on Intellectualism.

  • Lelia Glass, Stanford University.
    February 12 – 14, 2018
    Lelia is a PhD candidate in semantics and pragmatics at Stanford University. Her dissertation is about world-knowledge and the lexical semantics of distributivity.
    Lelia’s visit was a whirlwind of informal meetings and discussions, as well as her her talk Postsuppositions block pragmatic inferences: Evidence from the Mandarin belief verb yiwei

  • Emily Hanink, University of Chicago / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
    January 29 – February 1, 2018
    Emily is a PhD candidate in semantics at the University of Chicago and a Fulbright graduate fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her disseration is about the structure of the DP, with particular emphasis on the ways in which this structure interacts with subordinate clauses of various types.
    During her visit, she gave two talks, on Structural sources of anaphora and on “Like”: hedging and mirativity. A unified account. and she met with various members of the Konstanz semantics community to exchange ideas on current and future research projects.

  • Kelsey Kraus, University of California, Santz Cruz.
    September 14 – December 20, 2017
    Kelsey is a PhD candidate in semantics/pragmatics at UC Santa Cruz. Her dissertation looks at the relationship between sentence-level prosodic tunes and their pragmatic effects on English and German discourse particles.
    She came to Konstanz mainly to consult with Maribel Romero on her dissertation research, but during her stay here, she also took part in the activities of, and became a valued part of, the Konstanz semantics community.

  • Sunwoo Jeong, Stanford University.
    September 14 – 21, 2017
    Sunwoo is a PhD candidate in semantics/pragmatics at Stanford University. Her dissertation research focusses on various ways in which intonation and clause typing interact.
    Sunwoo extended her stay after the Questioning Speech Act workshop to scout out a collaboration with Sven Lauer on intonation in interrogatives.