Talk by Sophia Oppermann

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Sophia Oppermann (University of Jena) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus. It will be held in German. Title: Koordinationsstrukturen im Alt- und Mittelhochdeutschen Date: December 14 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Place: IG Farben, room 4.301 Abstract: Trotz oder gerade wegen der Universalität und scheinbaren Simplizität von Koordinationsstrukturen bestehen selbst in syntaktisch so gut erforschten Sprachen wie dem Englischen oder dem Deutschen nach wie vor zahlreiche offene Fragen, sowohl hinsichtlich der zugrundeliegenden syntaktischen Struktur als auch hinsichtlich der Abgrenzung gegenüber Subordination (vgl. Hartmann 2015). Die vorliegende Untersuchung verfolgt das Ziel, erstmals eine empirische Datenbasis für syndetische Koordinationsstrukturen im Alt- und Mittelhochdeutschen zu schaffen. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung stehen dabei diachrone Veränderungen sowie die Frage, welche Schlussfolgerungen daraus für die Syntax von Koordinationsstrukturen im Deutschen gezogen werden können. ...
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Talk by Thomas Weskott (University of Göttingen)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Weskott (University of Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium where he will present joint work with Johanna Klages, Elsi Kaiser, and Anke Holler. 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: Testing Perspectivization Effects Online: The Case of Counteridenticals Date: December 9 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Taking on another person's perspective is a fundamental part of human cognition. Linguistic expressions play an important role in perspectivization: they can signal a shift in perspective, and their interpretation can be sensitive to different perspectives (see Bylinina et al., 2015). Although there is quite a lot of literature on the semantics and pragmatics of perspective shifting and perspective sensitivity, experimental investigations of the comprehension processes involved is relatively sparse, especially with respect to online measures. In this talk, we present a visual word eye-tracking experiment in which participants were presented with linguistic stimuli that contained counteridenticals, i.e. counterfactuals of the form...
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Talk by Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Wuppertal)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place in a hybrid format. If you want to attend the talk on campus, you can just join us in IG 4.301. In case you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title:The interpretative options of anaphoric complex demonstratives Date: December 2 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present experimental evidence from a ‘yes’/’no’ judgement task and two acceptability rating studies (Experiments 1a-c) for the claim made in Hinterwimmer (2019) that sentences with two anaphorically interpreted complex demonstratives are less acceptable than sentences with two anaphorically interpreted definite descriptions and sentences where one of the two previously introduced referents is picked up by a complex demonstrative, while the other one is picked up by a definite description. The results of Experiment 1a and 1b are in principle compatible with the account argued for in Hinterwimmer (2019), according to which the...
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Phonology Colloquium – Ludger Paschen, 24.11.21, 16-18, on campus!

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
Dear all, We are happy to announce the next talk in the phonology colloquium by Ludger Paschen (Leibnitz ZAS, Berlin & Potsdam University) Title: Final Lengthening – a universal phenomenon? Insights from 25 languages Date: November 24, 2021 Time: 16-18 ct Location: IG 4.301 Abstract: Final Lengthening – a universal phenomenon? Insights from 25 languages. Lengthening of segments in the vicinity of prosodic boundaries is often considered a universal phonetic process (Fletcher 2010). However, language-specific variation with respect to the scope and extent of lengthening is also attested, especially in languages that have a phonological vowel length contrast (Hyman 2009, Nakai et al. 2009). In this talk I will present results from a cross-linguistic study investigating final lengthening of vowels in 25 languages from a worldwide sample. The data are taken from DoReCo, a corpus containing annotated and time-aligned recordings from language documentation projects (Seifart et al. 2021). Results indicate that while final lengthening is widespread, it is not without exceptions, and the presence of phonological quantity may indeed...
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Talk by Aleksandra Ćwiek (ZAS Berlin)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Aleksandra Ćwiek (ZAS Berlin) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Sorting the Mischmasch of German Ideophones Date: November 25 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Most of the articles or lectures on ideophones begin with quoting Mark Dingemanse’s work. This one will be no different. An ideophone is “a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse, 2019, 16). Words like boing or swish evoke a sense of sound and movement, respectively. However, Indo-European languages have been called “ideophonically impoverished” (Diffloth, 1972, 440; Nuckolls, 2004). In this project, I tackle this problem by inspecting the breadth of ideophones in German. I will present a data set of German ideophones that my colleagues and I collected from children’s books. Overall, we collected a total of 1,020-word forms and 650 lemmas, i.e., unified word forms. In this talk, I will present the data and discuss some further ideas to refine it. In addition,...
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