Autor: Lennart Fritzsche

We are happy to announce a talk by Jeremy Kuhn (CNRS) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Boundaries in space and time: Iconic biases across modalities Date: January 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In cognition, spatial and temporal boundaries have been theorized to be central to humans' perception of objects and events. In language, a related semantic property has characterized the mass/count and telic/atelic oppositions, which have been argued to be grounded in these non-linguistic conceptual representations. Intriguingly, boundarihood has also been shown to be involved in a motivated mapping in sign language: telic verbs are associated with gestural boundaries. In a series of experiments, we investigate the origin of this mapping bias. We show that non-signing subjects show an iconic bias to associate bounded forms with bounded meanings, and unbounded forms with unbounded meanings. The representations involved are abstract and domain general: the bias is found both for...

We are happy to announce a talk by Ahmad Al-Bitar (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: 'Average': A unique modifier Date: December 17 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The modifier average has interestingly different uses, among which the ‘abstract’ use is the most well-studied. Carlson & Pelletier (2002), Kennedy & Stanley (2009) and Morzycki (2016) provide analyses of the famous example in (1-a). This sentence can be true without there being an individual with the impossible property of having 2.3 children. Hence the naming ‘abstract’. (1) a. The average American has 2.3 children. (Abstract use)       b. The average age of the students is 21. (Abstract use) This use is differentiated from another use called the ‘concrete’ use as in (2). While this use is compatible with both the definite and indefinite articles, the abstract use seems to (always) prefer the definite article; see (3-a) and (3-b). This preference can be unambiguously observed in Arabic...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kathryn Davidson (Harvard University) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Domain selection and the role of sign language loci Date: December 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In the study of the formal semantics of sign languages, significant attention has been given to the analysis of sign language loci, or the use of signing space to keep track of discourse referents. Notably, within formal frameworks, sign language loci have been used as evidence in favor of dynamic semantics as a case of overt variable indices, and they also share several properties in common with phi features. In this talk, I will focus on their pragmatic behavior, notably their low frequency in sign language corpora and production studies, and argue that the role of loci in contextual domain selection (for quantification, focus alternatives, and questions) has been overlooked. I will suggest an analysis...

We are happy to announce a talk by Nicole Gotzner (ZAS) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please note that the talk will already begin at 3 pm sharp. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: The use and interpretation of gradable adjectives Date:December 3 Time: 3 pm - 5 pm st Abstract: The use and interpretation of gradable adjectives Gradable adjectives like tall are well studied in semantics (e.g., Kennedy, 2007) but the pragmatic inferences associated with such adjectives remain underexplored. The present talk targets the role of different semantic and contextual factors in the use and interpretation of bare and negated adjectives.  In the first part, I will demonstrate an interplay between the properties of the measurement scale underlying the semantics of adjectives and their associated implicatures (Gotzner, Solt & Benz, 2018a,b; Leffel, Cremers, Gotzner, & Romoli, 2019). Then, I present a novel experimental paradigm (Gotzner & Kiziltan, to appear) indicating that participants use distinct portions of a scale...

We are happy to announce a talk by Vesela Simeonova (University of Tübingen) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday at 4 pm. Title: The logophoric side of reportative evidentials Date: November 26 Time: 4 pm - 6 pm Abstract: Evidentiality and logophoricity have been known to be in a typological complementary distribution (Aikhenvald, A. 2004. Evidentiality. OUP). The explanation defended by this talk is that they contain the same element - a pronoun referring to an attitude holder - realized differently: overt in logophoric languages, covert in evidential ones. I present novel data on evidentiality, which demonstrate striking parallels between reportative evidentials and logophors as well as drastic differences between reportative and direct evidentials. The formal account is couched within decompositional semantics, with a new syntax to host the proposed evidential argument structure....