Autor: Lennart Fritzsche

We are happy to announce a talk by Nadine Bade (Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: July 11, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Shared mechanisms behind matrix and embedded implicatures — evidence from priming Abstract: There is an ongoing debate in the literature on implicatures regarding what mechanisms are behind their derivation. Specifically, theories make different predictions for the role of different types of alternatives in implicature computation. More recently, this question has been tackled in the experimental literature by making use of a priming paradigm (Chemla & Bott, 2016, Rees & Bott 2018, Waldon & Degen 2021, Marty et al. 2024). I will offer an extension of the existing priming paradigm which includes embedded (downward-entailing) cases as well as cases highlighting the alternative visually (or not). The results suggest that both influence the rate to which implicatures are derived. I will...

We are happy to announce a talk by Carla Spellerberg (Amherst) and Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: July 4, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Nouns and their typical activities Abstract: In this talk, we present parts of our ongoing joint work on the semantics and processing of English adjective noun constructions such as the following: (1) a. Mary is a skillful dancer. b. Mary is a skillful ballerina. c. Mary is a skillful person. d. Mary is a skillful beginner. We assume that adjectives like skillful are underspecified, and capture this by means of a parameter in the semantics of these adjectives. Moreover, we assume that value of this parameter is supplied as a default by world knowledge associated with certain nouns, or is supplied by the context of utterance. We are interested in the (in)ability of nouns to provide a default interpretation: while...

We are happy to announce a talk by Emil Eva Rosina (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: June 27, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Pragmatics in experiments on remembering as a gate to epistemology Abstract: In this talk, I present for the first time in a talk format the results of six experiments on memory reports and discuss the results with regard to Kristina Liefke's and my semantics of German 'noch wissen, dass/wie' (lit. 'still know that/how'). Our semantics predicts that “remembering how” requires better evidence than “remembering that”. My experimental data suggests an even broader phenomenon of experientiality in memory reports, confirming also the unacceptability of ‘Blue remembers Grandma swimming in the sea’ when Blue did not personally experience the swimming. For the case of ‘dass’/’that’ complements in the same situation (so concerning the question whether indirect experiencers remember...

We are happy to announce talks by Sebastian Walter (Frankfurt) and Lennart Fritzsche (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talks will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: June 6, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct    Sebastian Walter (first half of the session) Title: Viewpoint matters: Prototypical vs. non-prototypical co-speech gestures in the VP domain (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer) Abstract: In this talk, Ebert et al.’s (2020) theory of the semantic contribution of co-speech gestures is extended to the VP domain. We investigate the distinction between what we call prototypical and non-prototypical co-speech gestures in that domain. Prototypical gestures in general resemble the prototypical concept they depict (in the case of (1), for example, waving with one hand). Non-prototypical gestures, by contrast, can be seen as modified alternatives of a prototypical gesture that are interpreted completely iconic (in (1), e.g., waving with both hands). Crucially, an instance...

We are happy to announce a talk by Janek Guerrini (Paris) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: May 2, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Distributive kind predication Abstract: Germanic bare plurals and Romance definite plurals are thought to be kind-denoting, as they provide suitable arguments for predicates that hold of kinds (Carlson, 1977), as in e.g. ‘lions are extinct’. Kinds are standardly seen as intensional sums. In this work, I argue that, if we extend to kind-denoting plurals tools independently motivated by the treatment of referential plurals, a number of puzzles concerning the distribution of kind-denoting plurals, both old and novel, fall in line. ...