Talk by Jacopo Romoli (Univerity of Düsseldorf)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Jacopo Romoli (Univerity of Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title:Implicating in semi-cooperative contexts (joint work with Paul Marty, Yasutada Sudo, and Richard Breheny) Date: February 17 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In ordinary conversations, disjunctive sentences like June visited Frankfurt or Düsseldorf are commonly understood as conveying that she didn’t visit both cities (exclusivity), and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two cities she visited (ignorance) (Grice 1975, Gazdar 1979, Horn 1972 a.o.). There is general consensus that these inferences are not conveyed as part of the literal meaning, but rather they arise as implicatures. On the standard pragmatic approach, implicatures are the output of implicit reasoning on the part of the hearer over why the speaker said what she said and why not something else (Grice 1975, Horn 1972, Gazdar 1979, Sauerland 2004, Geurts 2010, Chemla 2010, van Rooij &...
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Talk by Max Berthold (GU Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Nominal Aktionsarten Date: February 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Based on a convincing amount of semantic properties shared by verbal tense and the German temporal adjective damalig, I concluded in my last presentation that the adjective is a functional nominal tense. In this talk, I want to address what initially appear to be semantic differences between damalig and verbal tense. First, intuitions may suggest that damalig exhibits semantic restrictions with particular types of nouns such as die damalige Milch (‘the milk at the time‘). Second, German native speakers share the intuition that sentences such as Der damalige Taxifahrer sang die ganze Fahrt ('The taxi driver at the time sang the whole ride) is odd in contexts in which damalig‘s reference time is close to the time of utterance (e.g., yesterday/last week). This behavior would be undesirable if we maintain...
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Talk by Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers University)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers University) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Pointing in spoken and signed languages Date: February 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Pointing is a gesture that occurs early in development and continues to be used with language in both spoken and signed languages. The different distributional and interpretational properties of pointing in the two modalities of language raise the question of whether there is one or many kinds of pointing found across languages and developmental stages. In this talk, I propose a unified analysis of pointing, where it is analyzed as a locational restriction. I argue that the differences observed in the two modalities of language can be derived from assuming a general restriction against cross-modal composition and discuss its implications on the use of pointing and deictic reference....
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Talk by Ewa Trutkowski (Freie Universität Bozen)

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Ewa Trutkowski (Freie Universität Bozen) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. The talk will take place online and will be held in German. Title: Einige experimentelle Befunde an der Genus/Sexus-Schnittstelle (abstract below) Time: February 1st, 2 pm – 4 pm ct Zoom-Link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/j/93325272580?pwd=NlM5a3FrRUwxSUpXa0dVQ1hnU3h5UT09   Abstract: In meinem Vortrag werde ich die Ergebnisse einiger Akzeptabilitätsstudien zum Kongruenzverhalten verschiedener Klassen von Nomen an der Schnittstelle von Genus und Sexus vorstellen. Der Fokus liegt auf Prädikativkonstruktionen. Die Befunde zeigen unter anderem, dass sich maskuline Nomen – auch solche ohne Sexusmerkmale, wie ‚Mensch‘, ‚Gast‘ etc. – in Bezug auf Kongruenz bzw. Kongruenzmismatches anders verhalten als Feminina, was eine syntaktische Unterscheidung der beiden Genera nahelegt und eine Absage an die strikte Kopplung von Genus an Sexus in der Belebtheitsdomäne ist (wie sie z.B. von Kotthoff & Nübling 2018:77 nahegelegt wird). Dies ist auch insofern relevant, als die Interpretation von Genus im Sinne von Sexus (also die Vermengung bzw. Gleichsetzung dieser beiden Merkmale) eine der...
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Talk by Carolin Reinert (GU Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: The compositionality of adjective noun constructions – The role of context-dependence Date: January 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: There are two major proposals discussed in the literature regarding the question how adjectives are to be analyzed semantically: (i) adjectives are predicates or (ii) adjectives are modifiers (see, e.g., Montague 1970, Kamp 1975). While adjectives like red are analyzed as predicates, adjectives like tall and skillful need a more complex approach and receive a modifier analysis. However, there are alternatives on the market: for gradable adjectives like tall, complex predicate analyses such as the measure function approach (see, e.g., Kennedy 1999, 2005, Kennedy&McNally 2005) have been developed, building on the observation that such adjectives are dependent on a comparison class. As a consequence of the analysis as a complex predicate,...
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