The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the third funding phase of the CRC 1252 “Prominence in Language”, which will begin on January 1, 2025. We are thrilled that we have the opportunity to continue our research on prominence in language with a focus on larger discourse structures and dialogue over the next four years.

This call has ended. | Project C10 of the CRC 1252 seeks to fill a research assistant position (f/m/x) (65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028.The application deadline is January 27. For more information please click here.

Aviad Albert (A01) and Tabea Thies (associated with A04) received the Offermann Hergarten Prize 2024 for their dissertations "A Model of Sonority Based on Pitch Intelligibility" and "Tongue Body Kinematics" respectively! They were awarded the prize at a ceremony that took place at the Neuen Senatssaal on Monday 9th of December 2024!

We are pleased to announce that considering both funding phases, the CRC has just surpassed the 500 publications mark! You can find all SFB-related publications on the Publications webpage by clicking here.

This call has ended. | There are twelve (12) open doctoral positions within the CRC 1252, from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028 within several projects. The application deadline is on the 17th of January 2024. For more information, please click here.

This call has ended. | The CRC1252 „Prominence in Language“ has opened applications for Junior (3-6 months) and Senior short-term (1-3 months) fellowships. The application deadline is January 20th, 2025. More information on the application process can be found here.

The next networking meeting of the linguistic CRCs in Germany will take place in Cologne on November 4 -5. This time it covers the topic of ‚Face to Face Interaction‘. Find more information on the workshop series here.

Petra Schumacher gave the annual Hermann Paul lecture at the Hermann Paul Center of Linguistics in Freiburg on Thursday, July 11, 2024. She talked about the future of experimental pragmatics and the turn towards investigating language in more ecologically valid situations.

This call has ended. | We’re looking for two student assistants (SHKs) in project Z to support the coordination of the CRC 1252. The positions are to be filled as soon as possible and each involve 8-12 hours of work per week (by arrangement). They are initially limited to one year, with the prospect of an extension. The application deadline is October 18. For more information please click here.

On June 12, 2024, Jakob Egetenmeyer (C02) gave his habilitation lecture on the topic: Speech verbs with imperfecto in diachrony. In addition, Simon Fries (B08) (Title: "The Origin and Development of the East Baltic Subjunctive Mood") and Magdalena Repp (C07) (Title: "D-pronouns in narrative texts: Examining referential behaviour and neural processing" ) successfully defended their doctoral theses in June and July. Congratulations!

Martine Grice (A01, A02 & C09) has been elected to the board of the Free Journal Network! The FJN is a nonprofit organisation promoting and supporting free and fair Open Access for scholarly articles. Congratulations! Find more information on the network here.

Tabea Thies (associated with A04) received the Innovation Prize of the Parkinson Foundation in the category clinical research. The prize is endowed with €100,000 and was awarded at the German Congress for Parkinson's and Movement Disorders in Rostock. Michael Barbe, Michael Sommerauer (University Hospital Cologne), Doris Mücke (A04) and Ilona Rubi-Fessen (UzK) are also involved in the project "Speech motor biomarkers in Parkinson's disease". Congratulations!

Semra Kizilkaya (former colleague in B04, now at Bielefeld University) has received the Wilhelm von Humboldt-Award for young scholars for her dissertation on affectedness. Semra received the prize at this year’s annual DGfS (German Linguistic Society) conference taking place in Bochum. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (A03, B05 & INF), who has been elected International Chair by the Laboratoire d’excellence “Fondements Empiriques de la Linguistique" (EFL) and will give four lectures in Paris in March and April 2024 on the topic “Taking spoken language seriously”. Click here to find recordings of the talks.

This year’s annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) took place from February 28 to March 1 at the Ruhr University Bochum. Members of the CRC were involved in the organization of two workshops:
AG 2 “Attitudinal meaning in prosody”: Timo Buchholz (C04), Heiko Seeliger (A06) & Katharina Zahner-Ritter (Trier)
Short AG 12 “Naturalistic approaches to reference”: Magdalena Repp, Clare Patterson (C07) & Ingmar Brilmayer

The Mercator Institute for Literacy and Language Education is organizing its annual conference on February 26 - 27 on "language education as a social mandate" ("Sprachliche Bildung als gesellschaftlicher Auftrag"). Click here to find the program and register (deadline: February 13). At the conference, C03 will present their latest project results and Sonja Eisenbeiß organizes a practical workshop on creative approaches to language education in schools.

On Wednesday January 17, Constantijn Kaland will give a habilitation lecture on "Why are averages more attractive? A new perspective from speech rhythm" that is open to the faculty. The lecture will take place from 4 p.m. in room S 11 in the seminar building.

The Genderboard of the CRC 1252 is organizing a workshop on "Empowerment" for the first time taking place January 26, 2024. In the afternoon, all members of the CRC are invited to participate in a reading by Dr. Reyhan Şahin from the book "Yalla, Feminismus". The morning workshop "You want power?" is for all FLINTA* PhDs and postdocs of the CRC and will be led by Naomi Ryland. Registrations are open until November 15 and more information can be found here!

The CRC 1252 „Prominence in Language“ has opened applications for Junior (3-6 months) and Senior short-term (1-3 months) fellowships. The application deadline is January 6th, 2024. More information on the application process can be found here.

Lukas Müller (former PhD student C02) has won two prices for his dissertation on The Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect in Discourse! At the last Romanistentag, taking place September 24 - 27 in Leipzig, he was awarded the Elise Richter-Preis by the Deutscher Romanistenverband and the Georg-Rudolf-Lind-Förderpreis by the Deutscher Lusitanistenverband. Congratulations!

Projects C02 and C06 organised the workshop "Argumentation and maneuvering agreement in discourse" on December 7 and 8. If you want to participate, please send an email to Isabel Fuhrmann (ifuhrma2(at)uni-koeln.de) or Jakob Egetenmeyer (j.egetenmeyer(at)uni-koeln.de) by November 30, 2023.

We welcome Prof.' Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, who will visit us for three months starting October 20 as part of the Global Faculty Program of the University of Cologne. She is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of South Australia. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky will also be teaching a seminar on “Introduction to Data Science” (Wednesdays, 2 p.m., Lecture Hall XVIIb, Main Building) at the IdSL1 this semester.

We welcome Prof. Matthias Schlesewsky, who is visiting us as part of the Global Faculty Program of the University of Cologne for three months starting October 20. He is a Professor of Psychology at the University of South Australia. On October 23, Matthias Schlesewsky will give a talk in the CCLS Lecture Series and will also hold a seminar at IdSL1 this semester on "Neurotyplogy: Many Languages, one Brain” (Wednesdays, 10 a.m., S58, Philosophikum).

On November 15, 2023, the Student Council for Linguistics and Phonetics, together with the Department of Linguistics, is organizing the career day "Perspectives for Linguistics". Students can get to know different occupational fields and ask speakers questions about their background and their current job. Some current and some former CRC members will also present their paths. Further information and the program can be found here!

Constantijn Kaland (A03) will give an online workshop on 'Cluster analysis on f0 contours: advantages, pitfalls, challenges' on November 9 and 10. This will be organized by LingLabs of the University of Konstanz and will take place via Zoom. Participation is free of charge. Here you can find more information as well as a link to the registration.

Various experimental methods are used in linguistic research to study language processing. A series of videos (in German) now provides a brief introduction into each method. Click here to access the YouTube playlist. The videos were produced as part of the DFG-funded Priority Program SPP 1727 'XPrag.de' and were recorded in the Laboratory for Experimental Linguistics in Cologne (XLinC).

We congratulate Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, who has been granted a Reinhart Koselleck-project of one million euros by the DFG. ‘Taking Spoken Language Seriously’ will address the question of the relevance of properties of spoken language for grammatical analysis for five years. Reinhart Kosseleck-projects provide funding for particularly innovative and, in a positive sense, higher-risk research and are only awarded to researchers with a proven scientific track record.

AG 6 'Attitudinal meaning in prosody' at the next annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (Bochum, February 28 to March 1, 2024) is organized by Timo Buchholz (C04), Heiko Seeliger (A06) and Katharina Zahner-Ritter (University Trier). The call for papers is open until September 1. Please find the full call here.

We're looking forward to the next SFB Networking Event on August 25, 2023, in Potsdam. In this series of events, members of the four linguistic SFBs in Berlin, Potsdam, Saarbrücken and Köln meet regularly. Click here for more information!

On Thursday 24th August, Martine Grice (A01, A02, C09) was in Dublin to give a keynote talk at Interspeech 2023 the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. Her talk was entitled "What’s in a Rise? The Relevance of Intonation for Attention Orienting". Find more info on the conference here.

AG 12 'Naturalistic approaches to reference' at the next annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (Bochum, February 28 to March 1, 2024) is organized by Magdalena Repp, Clare Patterson (C07) and Ingmar Brilmayer. The call for papers is open until August 15. Please find the full call here.

On October 12 and 13, we invite to a workshop on the prosody-pragmatics interface at the University of Cologne that is especially aimed at early career researchers. Click here for more info on the workshop and the full call. The deadline for the call for papers is July 25.

From June 16 to 17, the LingCologne2023 took place in Cologne with this year's theme 'Prediction in Language'. Click here for more information about the conference!

We congratulate Doris Mücke (A04) to the Labex EFL International Chair at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris! As part of the chair, she is giving a series of lectures on "Speech Dynamics".

Maria Bardají i Farré (B05) received the Wilhelm von Humboldt Award for young scholars. It was awarded to her and to Aikaterini Lida Kalouli at the 45th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society. Congratulations!

We invite our PhD students to participate in the Nacaps study („National Academics Panel Study“) - a nationwide longitudinal study of doctoral students and doctoral graduates. Click here for more information and for a link to the study.

Several projects of the CRC are once again involved in the KölnerKinderUni and offer engaging events on the topic of language for children grade 3-6. More information about the program can be found here (in German).

Kedi Simpson (University of Oxford, Department of Education) will give a talk on April 13 at 10 a.m. in the HoP Spitzboden on "You say bouteille d’eau, I write potato: what do beginner learners of French really understand when they hear French?”.

At the 45th Annual Meeting of the DGfS (March 7-10) in Cologne, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (A03, B05, C09, INF) gave a plenary talk titled "Creativity and routine at the prosody-syntax interface: playing with intonation unit boundaries."

From March 7 to 10, the 45th annual conference of the German Linguistic Society („Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft“) will take place at the University of Cologne. This year’s topic is "Linguistic Creativity and Routine". Find the full program here.

Nikolaus Himmelmann (PI of the projects A03, B05, C09 and INF) visited the Theory Neutral Podcast and spoke about ‚Demonstratives in Narrative Discourse‘. You can listen to the episode here.

Diego Romero Heredo (former PhD B04) was awarded the Offermann-Hergarten Prize for his PhD thesis this year. Congratulations!

This call has ended. | The CRC 1252 „Prominence in Language“ has opened applications for Junior (3-6 months) and Senior short-term (1-3 months) fellowships. The application deadline is January 15th, 2023. More information on the application process can be found here.

Marco García García (B04) participated in the "Homenaje al Hispanismo Alemán" (event in honor of Hispanic Studies in Germany), representing Spanish Linguistics in Germany. The event was held in the presence of the Queen of Spain in the framework of the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Spain was the guest country this year.

On the occasion of Klaus von Heusinger's (B04, C04) 60th birthday a Festschrift was published by Chiara Gianollo, Lukasz Jedrzejowski and Sofiana I. Lindemann. Many members of the CRC wrote contributions. Click here to see the open access publication.

Runners from the CRC 1252 successfully completed the Köln-Marathon 2022: The picture shows the CRC relay team (who finished the full marathon in 03:38:19!) and Barbara Zeyer (B06), who finished the half marathon.

On November 18, 2022, a workshop on L2 Sentence and Discourse Processing took place, which was funded by the CRC. It was organised by Clare Patterson (C07), Jacopo Torregrossa (C03), and Sol Lago (Goethe University Frankfurt). Click here for more information!

Project A04, in collaboration with CNRS/Sorbonne Nouvelle, has created an open source software (ema2wav) for the conversion of articulographic data. The software runs platform independent and allows the annotation and analysis of movement trajectories (lips, tongue, jaw) in the phonetics software Praat. Find the software here.

Given the current political situation, the Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1252 “Prominence in Language” invites applications for short-term fellowships for refugee researchers from Ukraine or Russia to work in the CRC for a maximum duration of six months. Application for this program has closed!

Since 2017, researchers in the CRC have produced a total of over 300 publications! We are proud of our colleagues, because they contribute to a comprehensive description of prominence. Here you can find all publications of the CRC!

Members from projects A02, A04 and A07 gave talks at this year's LabPhon, which took place from June 23 to 25. Click here to see the full conference program!

The ‘Third Cologne Ankara Discourse Meeting (CADiM3)’ took place at the House of Prominence on July 1st, 2022. It was organized by Frederike Weeber and Klaus von Heusinger and focused on discourse topics such as reference production and comprehension. Click here for more information!

On June 20th, the hybrid and interdisciplinary workshop 'NeuroSpeech 22' took place. This workshop strengthened the cooperation between neurology and linguistics and was jointly organised by members of the University Hospital Cologne and the SFB 1252. You can find more information here!

Our 3rd International Conference "Prominence in Language" will take place June 2-3, 2022. Click here to see the program and to register until May 24!

Our 3rd International Conference on "Prominence in Language" will take place June 2-3, 2022. The deadline for the Call for Abstracts has now been extended to February 7, 2022. Click here for the full call.

The Center for Language, Information and Philosophy (CLIP) is organising a workshop on NP-deletion on February 9-10, 2022. Click here for more information!

The CRC 1252 "Prominence in Language" has opened applications for Junior (3-6 months) and Senior short-term (1-3 months) fellowships. Application deadline is January 25th, 2022. More information on the application process can be viewed here.

Martine Grice (PI of the projects A01, A02 & C09) and Bodo Winter (Mercator Fellow) were guests in the BecauseLanguage podcast. They spoke about the Replicability Crisis in Linguistics following their article in Linguistics. You can listen to the episode and find the transcript when you click here.

Simon Roessig from project A04 was awarded the Offermann-Hergarten Prize of the University of Cologne for his dissertation on 'Categoriality and continuity in prosodic prominence'! Congratulations!

On November 4-5 there was a workshop on DOM in Catalan (and Romance) and Language Contact with the guest researcher and Alexander von Humboldt scholarship holder Anna Pineda, who is affiliated to the CRC. The program can be found here.

On October 25 all members of the CRC came together to attend the 3rd virtual CRC Day. On this occasion, we followed up on project presentations and got together for bilateral meetings. The CRC Days are a great opportunity to welcome new members, share ideas and to foster further collaboration between the different projects.

We warmly welcome our two new coordinators, Britt Krukau (l.) and Cornelia Ehlen-Stein (r.) in Team Z and at the CRC! For more information about Team Z, click here.

We are pleased that apl. Prof. Dr. Andreas Trotzke will start as a professoral substitute in the CRC this semester. Andreas Trotzke's research interests include the syntax-pragmatics interface and he will give a talk on "Information structure and expressivity" in the Linguistischer Arbeitskreis on October 20, 4 pm.

Bachelor and Master theses relevant to the CRC 1252 are now collected in KUPS (Cologne University Publication Server). A link to the Series 'Papers on Prominence' can be found here!

We welcome Dr. Anna Pineda, who will be joining us as Humboldt Fellow from June 1, 2021 on. Further information on the SFB's broad national and international scientific network can be found here.

On March 25-26, the 19th STaPs will take place online. This year it is co-organized by Barbara Zeyer (PhD, B06). Petra Schumacher will give a keynote on "Referenzforschung im Spannungsfeld von Labor und Wirklichkeit“. Click here for more information!

The CRC 1252 was prominently represented at the virtual conference PaPE 2021, this time organized by upf Barcelona and the Universitat de Barcelona. Project A01, A02, A04, A06 and A07 participated. Click here for the Book of Abstracts!

Are you interested in the CRC research? With this booklet we share a prominent overview of the diverse ideas, results and developments from the first funding phase. Click here to have a look at the booklet.

Whether DGfS or CUNY- CRC researchers organize workshops, hold keynotes and present posters at many international conferences, of course always online. An overview of the activities can be found in the event calendar or in more detail on the website.

Announcement: Petra Schumacher (A01, C07, C09) will become associate editor of "Glossa Psycholinguistics", a new open access journal for psycholinguistic research.

Congratulations to our colleague Judith Schlenter (B06) who received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship for her project at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT).

Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Martine Grice (A01, A02, C09), Tobias Schröer was awarded the Faculty Prize of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities for his Bachelor's thesis on "Investigating potential acoustic correlates of sonority: Intensity vs. periodic energy".

From February 22-23, 2021, the 6th International Workshop of the University of Cologne and the University of Tokyo will take place on the topic "From Event to Discourse". For more information, the programme and zoom access, follow the link.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has approved a second funding period of the CRC 1252 Prominence in Language starting in 2021. We are looking forward to the next four years and the opportunity to continue our research on prominence in language.

The CRC 1252 is aware of the new challenges related to the corona virus (SARS-CoV-2) for research, teaching and administration. Here we bundle information on current measures and advice that we develop, implement and continually adapt to current trends in the CRC 1252.

On January 28, 2021, two more of our PhD students will present their completed dissertations, online via Zoom. You can find more information about all the presentations here.

Prof. Martine Grice (A01+A02) has received this year's Research Prize of the University of Cologne for outstanding research in arts and humanities. Here she explains her main research field in linguistics.

The introduction to a special issue in 'Language and Speech' on "Prosodic Prominence - A Cross-Linguistic Perspective" edited by Martine Grice and Frank Kügler is out now! Click on this box for the issue.