Kategorie: Semantik

We are happy to announce a talk by Caro Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: What is this teacher skillful at? Accounting for the meaning of skillful-type adjectives Date: November 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I would like to update on two aspects of a chapter of my dissertation. In the first part of the talk, I address the observation that when a skillful-type adjective combines with an individual denoting noun, the noun is able to serve as the basis for the interpretation of the adjective in some cases (e.g. in skillful teacher, which can be paraphrased as skillful as a teacher), and in others it is not able to do so (e.g. in skillful man, which cannot be paraphrased as skillful as a man). I will assume that this difference is due to an event variable being present in the semantics of teacher, but not man (see Rapp 2015, but compare Larson 1998,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Kind- vs. token-level modification Date: November 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: We use language to classify, subclassify, and simply group token entities, and also to attribute properties to the classes, subclasses and groups that we form. In this talk I examine the role of (mainly adjectival) modifiers in these function of language. There is ample evidence that languages distinguish grammatically between the use of modifiers to form a hierarchy of kind and subkind descriptions, to attribute ad-hoc properties to kinds (or subkinds), as well as to form subsets of entities of a given kind. I will survey various sorts of cases, focusing mainly on the elusive category of "relational" adjective, some challenges I have experienced in studying kind- vs. token-level adjectival modification, and some different techniques for exploring the different kinds of modification....

We are happy to announce a talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Interpretation and placement of English -ly adverbials: a case for a new quantitative approach Date: October 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The interplay of position and interpretation of adverbials has received considerable attention over the last 20 years. But even for English, there is no clear consensus on which readings need to be distinguished, which orderings of adverbials are grammatical, and whether, in the case of -ly adverbials, the semantic analysis should be based on the semantics of the base form or not. The aim of my talk is to discuss the ways quantitative measures like collocations and distributional semantics can be leveraged to clarify this picture. After an overview of the problems, I will discuss three case studies illustrating three different approaches. The first case study shows that collocations of the base adjectives in attributive position annotated for the ontological category of the head allow a more finegrained look at the consistency of...

We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:The first name/last name asymmetry – Observations and Experimental investigation Date: July 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In my research I adopt the assumption that proper names are no different than common nouns. This assumption bears the name predicativism in the literature on proper names. For predicativists, proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g. ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. I believe that predicativism can provide potential insight into the way in which proper names interact with determiners in some languages, and into the structure of complex proper names and of proper names below the word level. The focus of this presentation will be to present some observations related to complex proper names (i.e., full names) and to propose an experiment to...

We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: On Eventive Nouns Date: July 7 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Nominals contribute temporal information to the utterance. This information may or may not be independent from the verbal predication time denoted by the matrix verb with which the nominal appears. Available theories in semantic literature establish the parameters that govern the nominal predication time: the type of determiner, the tense on the verb, or the context. While this covers most of the empirical landscape, there are examples that have been unaccounted for. In this talk, I will advocate for an extension to the existing theories which aims to capture the lexical temporal properties of nouns. I will argue that nouns separate into two classes: eventive and state nouns. Eventive nouns are characterized by having a hidden event argument that can be anaphoric to contextually supplied events. This allows us to explain...