The RTG at FJUEL 2023
On September 29th and 30th, 2023, some of the members of our RTG took part in the annual FJUEL conference, hosted at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
The Forum Junge Englische Linguistik in Bayern (FJUEL) is a platform where doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, as well as students who are considering a future doctoral career, have the opportunity to present their research. The goal is to offer a space for young researchers of Bavarian Universities engaged in all areas of English linguistics to promote their work, receive feedback and build their own academic network.
This year RTG has made a meaningful contribution to FJUEL’s 11th edition. Starting from the organization, successfully carried out by our three RTG associates and committee members Panos Kenanidis, Leonarda Prela and Richenda Wright, continuing with the researchers’ presentations.
Sara Fernández Santos talked about how Predictive processing can alter phonetic perceptions in Spanish object relatives and with that showed us new data on the potential impact of on-line processing in speech – indicating that sometimes, depending on frequency effects, you really “hear what you expect” rather than what is said.
Vania de la Garza gave us insights into her research into The relationship between morphosyntactic productivity and print exposure in native Spanish speakers, further pursuing the investigation and relationship of reading and writing skills on language attainment.
Hendrik Kligge’s Approaching German Noun Phrases: Mental Representation(s) of Individual Speakers (and the Struggles of Mark Twain) presented a pilot study with German native speakers and showed some unexpected variations within the German Dative NPs.
Iryna Fokashchuk posed the question about the Universality of Prepositions? Examining the Translations of German Nouns with Governed Prepositions auf and an in English, Polish, and Ukrainian and presented her findings about the amount of language individual idiosyncrasies and the non-universality of prepositions across languages.
Last but not least, Yassine Iabdounane gave a talk about Modelling Multimodality in a Construction Grammar Framework: Some Issues and Challenges, discussed the nature of multimodal constructions and eventually showed us some leading challenges of representing those constructions in a construction grammar framework.
Hassane Kissane presented his work in the poster session, in which he dealt with Verb-Particle Combinations which he approaches from the perspective of transformer-based neural network models, giving new insights into their learnability and predictability.
On the second day of the event, Dr. Armine Garibyan gave the attendees insights into acquiring digital skills during the PhD and answered questions about how to best develop programming skills while working on a PhD project.
The conference finished with a round table discussion led by our colleague Dr. Elodie Winckel, who approached potential “Big Crises” that one faces during the PhD, and how to best deal with those problems.
We hope that everyone had a beautiful time at the conference – we sure did!