In the last week of February, several ViCom members took part in the 48th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS-Jahrestagung) at the University of Trier.
Anastasia Bauer was invited as a keynote speaker to the workshop “Tracing patterns across modalities – similarities and differences in speaking, writing and signing” and gave a talk on “Tracing heads: Kinematic and linguistic patterns of non manual signals in spoken and signed interaction”.
Alina Gregori and Frank Kügler coordinated a workshop on “Visual patterns in the phonetics of gestures” together with Petra Wagner (Bielefeld University) with invited speakers Hans Rutger Bosker (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Marc Swerts (Tilburg University).
The workshop was a great success, it featured very high quality talks which sparked interesting discussions and brought together a motivated, skilled and diverse group of researchers.
Šárka Kadavá and Door Spruijt participated in the workshop and gave talks on ViCom project topics (“How sign learners’ errors may inform phonetic variation in gesture”) and on a ViCom Short Term Collaboration (“Kinematic maturation of movement into manual language”).
Alina Gregori and Frank Kügler also gave a talk on MultIS project work (“Multimodal hyperarticulation: Alignment of prosody and gesture”).
The DGfS plenaries also featured multimodal aspects and on the general conference, multimodality received well-deserved increased attention in linguistics.
Beyond the scientific program, the conference offered multiple social events, lots of wines (even in the desert) and shuttle busses despite a ÖPNV strike…!