Our plenary speakers on the conference topic: "Tracing Patterns - Sprachlichen Mustern auf der Spur":

[Translate to Englisch:]

Jennifer Cole (Northwestern University)

“In conventional approaches to intonation, discrete phonological tone features mediate the relationship between time-varying, continuous pitch patterns and discrete contrasts in pragmatic meaning. Empirical observations challenge the division of labor between continuous and discrete representations--a tension that is resolved in an alternative approach, where category-level distinctions emerge through quantal behavior of a dynamical pitch-generating system”

Annette Gerstenberg (Universität Potsdam)

"Following speakers for a period of up to 18 years provides invaluable insights into their idiosyncratic patterns of combining words, merging phrases with intonation contours, and interacting with interlocutors. What is individual and what is collective? That’s the intriguing question that tracing linguistic patterns in an individual aging trajectory poses, against a background of same-generation voices"

Simon Meier-Vieracker (TU Dresden)

"Language is full of patterns. This basic assumption of language theory is currently being impressively confirmed by Large Language Models. This makes it all the more important to put it on the agenda of linguistic research in all its nuances"

Peter Uhrig (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

"For me, identifying linguistic (and multimodal) patterns is the path to a better understanding of linguistic phenomena"