Talk by Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen), Thursday 16th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the first talk of this decade by Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect Room: IG 4.301 Date: January 16th Time: 4pm - 6pm Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) The study I will present investigates the interaction of tense, aspect and syntactic position of temporal adverbials in the interpretation of sentences that are ambiguous with regard to their temporal interpretation. Sentences with specific time-frame adverbials in German and English (e.g., in three hours”; see example in (1)) are ambiguous between a durative reading, given in (1a), in which the event takes place in the time interval specified by the adverbial, and an inceptive reading, given in (1b), in which the event will start after this time interval. A series of experiments on German showed that the syntactic position of a temporal adverbial as well as verbal tense influences sentence...
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Talk by Johannes Mursell, Monday 16th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next last talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 16, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Johannes Mursell will talk about „Association with focus in German“. Abstract: In this talk, I discuss association with focus in German, i.e. examples like (1), mostly with respect to possible adjunction sites of the focus sensitive particle nur ‘only’. (1) Peter hat nur MARIA ein Geschenk gegeben. I will argue that the strong claim of Büring and Hartmann (2001) (B&H), building on early work from Jacobs (1983), can be maintained, namely that in German, nur can only be adjoined to extended verbal projections (VP/vP, TP, CP). I will pay particular attention to two problematic cases from the literature. Starting with extraposed CPs (Reis, 2005), the behavior of which forced B&H to weaken their proposal significantly, followed by a discussion of reconstruction data (Smeets and Wagner, 2018), I will show that B&H’s approach can easily account for the data when combined with some...
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Phonology Colloquium: Nele Ots (Goethe Universität)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the phonology colloquium by Nele Ots (Goethe Universität): Title: Conceptual and linguistic influences on sentence intonation: evidence from English and Estonian languages Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wed 11.12.19 Time: 16-18 Abstract: Phonetic corpus studies have found that phrase-initial F0 peaks correlate with duration of intonation phrases, indicating that speakers are able to anticipate the length of their utterances already before the speech onset. The current view on sentence planning is that while conceptual and syntactic planning processes can be broad, comprising larger parts of upcoming sentences, phonological encoding needs to evolve word by word - incrementally. In relation to sentence production, the phonetic observation of F0 raises a question: at which stage are the global parameters of sentence intonation decided in speakers' minds? The aim of the study was to empirically verify the causal relationship between the F0 peaks and the duration of intonation phrases, and to explore the online sentence formulation in two typologically different languages...
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Talk by Kristina Liefke – Thursday 12th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Kristina Liefke  (Goethe Universität) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: Single-Type Semantics and Depiction Reports (joint work with Markus Werning, Bochum) Room: IG 4.301 Date: December 12th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: In this talk, we show that single-type semantics (see Liefke and Werning, 2018) provides a compositional semantics for physical and mental depiction reports (e.g. 'Paul is painting a penguin', 'Uli is imagining a unicorn') that improves upon Montague-style semantics (see Moltmann, 1997) and property-based semantics for such reports (see Zimmermann, 2016; cf. Zimmermann, 1993). In particular, single-type semantics accounts for missing de dicto-readings of depiction reports with a strong quantificational object DP, blocks unwarranted inferences to a common objective, and captures the semantic interaction of DPs and CPs in depiction complements. The semantics also makes a number of plausible predictions about the role of context in the interpretation of depiction complements and the subjectivity of depicted contents. ...
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