Kategorie: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Petra Augurzky (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: Investigating effects of prosody and frequency on the on-line processing of quantified sentences – evidence from ERP studies on revision-sensitivity in German Date: January 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Recent studies have shown that compositional-semantic processing may sometimes proceed in a non-incremental manner. For instance, quantified sentences can exhibit considerable processing delays during on-line sentence comprehension. In my talk, I will introduce a series of ERP studies using picture-sentence verification that investigate such processing delays in sentences involving quantifier restriction in German. Overall, I will argue that the parser’s predictive capacity may sometimes lead to parsing delays associated with the on-line truth value assignment in a sentence. In the second part of the presentation, I will discuss two studies on contextual cues that might be used by the parser for overriding...

We are happy to announce a talk by Dolf Rami (University of Bochum) 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: A unified semantics for bare names and demonstratives Date: January 13 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that we not only have to distinguish bare from complex demonstratives, but also bare from complex proper names. In both cases, the semantics of the bare and the complex versions are significantly different, but nevertheless related. In this paper, I will mainly focus on a semantics for bare names and demonstrative. I will show that there are good reasons to consider them as close semantic relatives and I will propose a new use-sensitive formal semantics to account for their semantic relation, following and updating my investigations in this direction in Rami (2022)....

We are happy to announce a talk by Carla Umbach (University of Cologne) and Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) 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: Demonstratives of Manner, Quality and Degree – constraints on features of comparison  Date: December 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Demonstratives of manner, quality and degree occur across languages, e.g. Turkish böyle, Polish tak and German so (König & Umbach 2018). In (1) German so is used to express a quality modifying a car:  (1) (speaker points at a car):  Anna hat auch so ein Auto.  'Anna has a car like this, too.'  From the point of view of semantics, demonstratives of manner, quality and degree pose the problem of how to reconcile their demonstrative characteristics with their modifying capacity. Umbach & Gust (2014) suggest that these demonstratives are directly referential but express similarity (instead of identity) to the target of the demonstration gesture. Similarity is spelled out...