Autor: Anke Himmelreich

We are very happy to announce the next talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 9, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Francesco Pinzin will talk about „Latin verbal thematic vowels: aktionsart and overriding“. Abstract: Latin verbs show a set of vocalic elements before the Tense/Aspect/Mood morphemes, these elements are usually called Thematic Vowels (TVs): laud-ā-ba-m mon-ē-ba-m praise-tv1-impf-1sg advise-tv2-impf-1sg TVs are mostly analyzed as empty class markers, whose value is purely morphological (a.o., Aronoff 1994). The existence of syntactically and semantically empty morphemes logically requires the existence a post-syntactic and purely morphological step in the derivation where to insert them, call it Morphological Structure, as in Distributed Morphology models, or Paradigmatic/Morphomic level, as in Words and Paradigms models. In this presentation I argue that, as far as Latin TVs are concerned, there is no need for such a step. The distribution of Latin TVs with respect to the morphological base they select, the aktionsart semantics of the verb and...

We are happy to announce a talk by Ahmad Al-Bitar  (Goethe Universität) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: An in situ account for (Syrian Arabic) superlatives? Room: IG 4.301 Date: December 5th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: The sentence in (1) is given by Heim (1999, p. 7) and shown to have a reading that is problematic for any "in situ" analysis of the superlative. (1) John wants to climb the highest mountain. In addition to the absolute and relative readings, a third reading (called the "upstairs de dicto reading" by  Sharvit & Stateva (2000)), could be available for the superlative in (1). As Heim suggests, one can think of a survey conducted about "How high a mountain do you want to climb?". John says "I want to climb a mountain that is 6,000 m high"; Mary says "I want to climb a mountain that is 4,000 m high" and Bill says "I just want to climb a mountain that is 1,000...

We are very happy to announce the next talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 2, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Katharina Hartmann will talk about „Generalizing MaxElide“. Abstract: In this talk I argue that the constraint MaxElide (Merchant 2008) is more general than originally assumed. I show for German that MaxElide constrains all types of ellipsis in coordination and comparative formation. I conclude that this is compatible with movement accounts, rather than with base-generation + deletion accounts, of the respective structures.   You are cordially invited!...

Katharina Hartmann (Goethe University Frankfurt), Malte Zimmermann (University of Potsdam) and Doreen Georgi (University of Potsadam) co-organize the workshop Structural Asymmetries in African Languages on April 27-28, 2020 at the University of Potsdam. Deadline for abstract submission: December 31, 2019.    ...

We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode. Please find an abstract below. Title: "Gut" as a predicate of worlds Room: IG 4.301 Date: November 28 Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: In this talk I discuss the meaning of the evaluative adjective "gut" when combined with finite "dass" ('that')- and "wenn" ('if')-clauses as in (1). (1)    a. Es ist       gut,  dass du   gehst.             It be.IND good that  you go.IND         b. Es ist       gut,   wenn du   gehst.             It be.IND good if        you go.IND         c. Es wäre     gut,   wenn du   gehen würdest.             It  be.SUBJ good if        you go      will.SUBJ The focus of this talk will be on the rules of use of these sentences against a given conversational background and how they can be derived from a semantics for "wenn"/"dass" and IND/SUBJ under the assumption that "gut" is a 'regular' gradable adjective - with a twist: It takes a world argument in its subject position....