Autor: Anke Himmelreich

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, June 18, 4 – 6 pm in SH 5.105. Elly van Gelderen (Arizona State University) will present „Remarks on nominal modification“. Abstract: This talk investigates a number of facets regarding prenominal modifiers, some of it based on your (Uni Frankfurt grad students) interests and some on mine, the aspect and argument structure of deverbal modifiers. I’ll start with your work and discuss the DP from its higher to lower layers: what-for split in Early Modern English, adjective-ordering, three types of adjectives. This will show an expanding DP, at least in the history of English. Regarding argument structure, I’ll discuss two topics, past participles as diagnostic for unaccusatives and changes in a verb’s argument structure as affecting the modifier. English past participles of unaccusative verbs have been taken to modify nouns but not those of unergatives. However, the difference between unaccusatives and unergatives is not always clear-cut...

We are very happy to announce a talk in the English linguistics Oberseminar, which will take place on Monday, June 17, 4 – 6 pm in IG 3.201. Cornelia Ebert will present „On the (non-)at-issueness of gestures and the role of demonstratives“. Abstract: https://www.english-linguistics.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/EbertEtal-1906.pdf You are cordially invited!...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, June 17, 4 – 6 pm in IG 254. Sebastian Buchczyk will present „The correspondence of verb position in German and Romance subjunctives in embedded clauses“. Abstract: Buchczyk     You are cordially invited!...

We are very happy to announce a guest talk, which will take place on Friday, June 14, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Hans-Martin Gärtner (HAS-RIL Budapest) „Varieties of Dependent V2 and Verbal Mood: A View from Icelandic“. Abstract: I will discuss varieties of "dependent V2" with "broad" (bDV2) and "narrow" (nDV2) distribution − aka "generalized" and "limited embedded V2" − arising within Icelandic. This pattern is taken to correlate with construals of verbal mood as "dominant" in the former and "non-dominant" in the latter case, where dominance of verbal mood allows disregarding the illocutionary impact of V2. I further show that the variation fits into a model of historical stages with earlier variants "recruiting" verbal mood for clause combining and drift in later stages toward "autonomous" mood, i.e., toward a mood system with enhanced semantico-pragmatic transparency. You are cordially invited!...

We are very happy to announce a guest talk, which will take place on Friday, June 14, 2 – 4 pm in IG 4.301. Viola Schmitt (University of Vienna) and Frank Sode (Goethe University Frankfurt) „An anti-intellectualist treatment of German wissen (‘know’)“. Abstract: German wissen (‘know’) can embed both finite clauses (’wissen-FIN’) as well as infinitives (’wissen-INF ’). Based on novel empirical observations, we argue that wissen-INF cannot be reduced to the standard analysis of wissen-FIN , i.e. that wissen with infinitival complements does not involve a propositional attitude. As cross-linguistic evidence suggests that German wissen is not ambiguous, it follows that wissen-FIN cannot denote a propositional attitude, either. Accordingly, we require a new, uniform meaning for wissen. We derive this meaning by first considering wissen-INF, arguing that it combines semantic properties of ability modals with semantic properties of implicative verbs and enough to-constructions. We then show that these properties can also be used to characterize wissen-FIN , as long as certain non-standard...