Talk by Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Locality in focus marking Abstract: In this talk, I present an application of Graf's (2022) formalization of syntactic dependencies that suggests that (most) syntactic dependencies are based on adjacency, just like dependencies in phonology and morphology. Graf develops a tier-based strictly local  language (TSL) for these purposes. The talk will provide an  introduction into the complexity issue of language based on the Chomsky Hierarchy and then move on to explain Graf's TSL. Finally, the talk will apply the formalization to focus data from Likpakpaanl  trying to develop a diagnostic for the status of the focus particle. Concretely, I present an argument that the focus particle "le/la" in Likpakpaanl is a head....
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Talk by Janika Kunzmann (GU)

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Janika Kunzmann (GU). Title: Describing an Understudied Language of Northern Cameroon: Prominent Phonetic and Phonological Features of Mbum (Adamawa) Date: Wednesday, 07.12.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (if necessary, we will stream the talk via Zoom) If you are registered in Olat you'll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Describing an Understudied Language of Northern Cameroon: Prominent Phonetic and Phonological Features of Mbum (Adamawa) Mbum is a Kebi-Benue language classified by Boyd (1989) to be part of the Adamawa family. Like many languages of this group, which is highly disputed in its internal classification (cf. Kleinewillinghöfer 2014), Mbum lacks a detailed phonological description. Given this descriptive gap, my research aims to provide a general overview of the phonological and tonological characteristics of Mbum, as it is spoken today in Ngaoundéré and Nganha (Adamawa region, northern Cameroon)....
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Talk by Ramona Hiller (Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Ramona Hiller (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: A Corpus Study on German Privative Adjectives based on joint work with Carla Spellerberg Date: December 8 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present a corpus-based study of nine counterfactual German adjectives that allegedly behave privatively which was conducted by a fellow student, Carla Spellerberg, and me in 2021. Since Partee’s (2010) influential suggestion that privative adjectives actually behave subsective on the coerced denotation of the noun they combine with, a lot of research has investigated the way these adjectives shift the noun denotation. Our intention with this thorough look at a large number of German adjective-noun combinations featuring alleged privative adjectives is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to learn more about noun shifts that can actually be observed in natural language when privative adjectives are involved and how often subsective and privative uses of the respective adjective occur. This allows us to add more much-needed empirical evidence to...
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Talk by Sascha Alexeyenko (Universität Göttingen) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Sascha Alexeyenko (Universität Göttingen) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 05 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Modelling the direct-inverse system of Mapudungun Abstract: The direct-inverse system of Mapudungun/Mapuche (Araucanian; Chile, Argentina) presents a puzzling pattern of verbal marking in the so-called local scenarios, i.e. scenarios in which the arguments of a transitive clause are 1/2P speech act participants. In particular, the otherwise regular direct-inverse marking pattern breaks down, new markers emerge that do not otherwise appear in the paradigm, and the agreement system becomes sensitive to the cumulative number of the participants involved. The aim of this talk is to show that existing analyses of direct-inverse systems in terms of person licensing, most notably those by Bruening (2001) and Béjar and Rezac (2009), fall short in accounting for Mapudungun data and to offer an alternative account, which incorporates some of their insights, but differently from any...
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Talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
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 - Update on the experimental design and a possible semantic analysis Date: December 1 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, into the structure of proper names below the word level and into the structure of full names. The focus of this presentation will be to discuss my ongoing reflection on the semantics of last names (and, by extension, of full names). First, I will...
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