News

Kick-off of the Second Phase of ViCom in Bad Homburg
From March 10 to 13, 2026, the closing event for the first phase and the launch of the second phase of our priority program “Visual Communication (ViCom)” took place at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. Over the course of four days, many impressive research activities of the first phase were first presented. The second phase was then launched with numerous exciting insights into the new projects and an intensive exchange preparing many new collaborations. Wednesday was concluded with a plenary lecture by our Mercator Fellow Sotaro Kita (University of Warwick). In addition to the intensive academic exchange among members of both phases, there was time for social activities, informal discussions, and the establishment of new networks for the second phase. With this meeting, we have come a great deal closer to our goal of making the analysis of visual communication a core topic not only in linguistic research. We would like to thank the Forschungskolleg once again for their hospitality and professional support, which contributed significantly to the success of the meeting. Please find the program of the annual meeting here.

SignLab at ICOLL conference in Nagoya
In February 2026, Marta, Josiah and Vanessa presented their joint experimental study on how ideophonic language background affects the perception of foreign ideophones, using data from Ga, German, and Cantonese speakers. Josiah presented his joint work with Kim, Markus and Cornelia on the conventionalization of ideophone-accompanying gestures, based on data from Ga and German. Vanessa also gave a presentation about the (in)flexibility of classifiers, comparing findings from German (DGS) and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). The conference, ICOLL2026, was the first joint conference of ICOsem (Iconicity Seminar) and ILL (Iconicity and Literature). It was successfully held at the University of Nagoya, Japan. With over 50 participants, the conference featured inspiring invited talks by Noburo Saji, Mutsumi Imai, Neil Cohn, and Pamela Perniss. It was a very engaging conference, with valuable discussions on iconicity across modalities. We also had a lot of exciting discussions about iconicity and multimodality with scholars from across the globe. And we look forward to having more exchange on this exciting topic.

New article by "WissesnWert|DGS" in Life InSight
In issue 158 of “Life InSight” Thomas Finkbeiner, Markus Steinbach, Patrick Trettenbrein, and Nina-Kristin Meister published a bimodal informational text about their ViCom project “Parts of Speech and Iconicity in German Sign Language (DGS)”. The article in written German can be downloaded here.















Collaborative meeting of the linguistic Research Training Groups in Göttingen und Frankfurt
On January 22 and 23, 2026, a jointly organized workshop of the Göttingen Research Training Group 2636 "Form-meaning Mismatches" and the Research Training Group of the Frankfurt Collaborative Research Center 1629 "NegLaB" took place in the Casino of the University of Frankfurt. At this workshop, the doctoral students of the two Research Training Groups presented their projects and discussed possible collaborations and new joint research projects. There were also two plenary lectures by Katharina Hartmann (Frankfurt) and Thomas Weskott (Göttingen). The program of the workshop can be found here.

Lecture by Vadim Kimmelman
On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, Vadim Kimmelman from the University of Bergen gave a lecture entitled “Classifier Handshape Choice in Sign Languages” at 4 p.m. in our linguistic colloquium. In his lecture, Vadim presented new findings from the project “Whole-entity Classifiers: A Multiperspective Approach.” Among other things, this project examined various phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-related factors that can influence the choice between synonymous handshape classifiers in different sign languages. The lecture was translated into German Sign Language (DGS) by two interpreters. Forty participants from Göttingen attended online.