Talk by Viola Schmitt (Wien)

We are very happy to announce the next talk in our syntax colloquium this term. Viola Schmitt (Wien) will talk about "Distributive conjunctions and plurality — two cross-linguistic asymmetries", presenting joint work with Nina Haslinger (Göttingen), Eva Rosina (Vienna), Magdalena Roszkowski (Budapest) and Valerie Wurm (Vienna). The talk will take place online, please see the information below on how to participate. Title: Distributive conjunctions and plurality — two cross-linguistic asymmetries Time : 14.12.2020, 4pm Place: Zoom (If you are not a regular member of the syntax colloquium and if you would like to listen to this talk, please contact Katharina Hartmann. You will be sent a link / ID to Zoom.) You are all, as always, cordially invited! Abstract: We argue that the conjunctive coordinating morpheme COORD denotes a plurality-forming operation cross-linguistically and across categories. We first present two cross-linguistic generalizations which strongly suggest that the basic meaning of COORD in individual conjunctions (e.g.`Ada and Bea’) is not intersective, as in `classical' analyses of conjunction, but...
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Talk by Christiane Ulbrich (U Konstanz)

We are very happy to announce the next talk in our phonology colloquium this term. Christiane Ulbrich (U Konstanz) will talk about "Speech accommodation in L2" The talk will take place online, on Zoom. Please register beforehand (Kuegler@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom! Christine Ulbrich: Title: Speech accommodation in L2 Time: 09. December 2020, 4 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I am presenting the results of a series of experiments on speech accommodation to address two issues. (i) Even though research has dealt with such accommodation effects since the 1970s, the mechanisms behind the process(es) are still not very well understood. Some believe that accommodation is a dynamic process that speakers strategically apply to gain social approval and to attain communicational efficiency. Others proposes accommodation to be largely automatic. The question is how these two mechanisms can be observed in non-native speech. In other words, provided that a desire of non-native speakers to archive a high level of intelligibility can be assumed, does...
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Talk by Eva Zimmermann (U Leipzig)

Dear colleagues, we are very happy to announce the next talk in our phonology colloquium this term. Eva Zimmermann (U Leipzig) will talk about "Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions". The talk will take place online. Title: Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions Time: 02. December 2020, 4 pm ct Place: Zoom Abstract below: Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions The assumption of Gradient Symbolic Representations that phonological elements can have different degrees of activity (Smolensky and Goldrick, 2016; Rosen, 2016; Zimmermann, 2018, 2019) allows a unified explanation for the typology of phonological exceptions. Exceptional (non)triggers and (non)undergoers of otherwise regular phonological processes are predicted from gradient constraint violations: The activation of a phonological element in an underlying morpheme representation determines 1) how much the element is preserved by faithfulness constraints and 2) how much it is visible for markedness constraints. I argue that this simple mechanism predicts the attested typology of phonological exceptions and that the predictions made...
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Talk by Fenna Bergsma (Frankfurt)

We are very happy to announce the next talk in our syntax colloquium this term. Fenna Bergsma will talk about "A typology of case competition in headless relatives". The talk will take place online, please see the information below on how to participate. Please not the change from our usual time! Title: A typology of case competition in headless relatives Time : 30.11.2020, 2 pm Place: Zoom (If you are not a regular member of the syntax colloquium and if you would like to listen to this talk, please contact Katharina Hartmann: k.hartmann@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de. You will be sent a link / ID to Zoom.) Please see below for the abstract. You are all, as always, cordially invited! ============================ A typology of case competition in headless relatives   In case competition in headless relatives two aspects play a role. The first one is which case wins the case competition. It is a crosslinguistically stable fact that this is determined by the case scale in (1). A case more to the right on...
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Online-Talk by Jonathan Weinrich (GU) – April 23, Thursday 4-6 pm

We are happy to announce a talk by Jonathan Weinrich  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. If you didn't do it yet, send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before April 22. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Gestural referents as SDRT anaphora Date: April 23rd Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: Lascarides & Stone (2009) outline a semantic approach to interpreting gestures. They integrate the gestures into the SDRT framework of Asher & Lascarides (2003) and allow them to combine by discourse relations. This involves the usage discourse referents in a DRT-like fashion. While they do not explicitly advocate the idea, a possible interpretation of their examples suggests that all gestural discourse referents are restricted in coreference by the same structural constraints as pronouns. As a start of my research into formal...
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