Kategorie: Allgemein

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...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, June 13, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Kai von Fintel (MIT) will present „The "only" connectives“. Abstract: We present work in progress on an understudied phenomenon: the use of exclusives and exceptives as sentential coordinators. Some examples from English:   (1) He is a very nice man, only he talks too much. (2) I would have helped you, except I had a meeting at work.   Constructions of this kind are attested in several languages.   We explore importing results from the study of adversative coordinators such as English *but*, French *mais*, German *aber*. Questions arise about the relation between the occurrences in (1) and (2) and ordinary uses of exclusives and exceptives as in (3) and (4):   (3) Heather only had one shot on goal. (4) Every student passed the test except Gordon.   Among other things, we discuss what happens to the focus-sensitivity and the presuppositional asymmetry of ordinary exclusives...