Kategorie: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (Frankfurt) and Markus Steinbach (Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 7, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: The semantics of semi-conventionalized lexical depictions in spoken and sign languages Abstract: Typological research has shown that many unrelated spoken languages have ideophones such as English helter-skelter or German plitsch-platsch. Ideophones form a special class of words which are used in specific registers (often vivid narrative contexts) and can be defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). They have been argued to be depictive items which establish an iconic relationship of the form of an ideophone (including the utterance of it) and its meaning, which lies in the domain of sensory imagery encoding information about movement, sound, sentiment or mental state. In addition, ideophones typically contribute...

We are happy to announce a talk by Magnus Poppe (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: October 31, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Dynamic Binding and Pronoun Dis-agreement Across Modalities Abstract: In multimodal discourse, pointing gestures introduce referents that enhance pronoun resolution, even when grammatical agreement between pronoun and gesture-introduced referents is absent. This study examines the role of "pointing" versus "non-pointing" gestures in pronoun binding by manipulating gesture type and pronoun agreement. Results indicate that pointing gestures facilitate pronoun resolution across both agreeing and non-agreeing contexts, while non-pointing gestures lack this referential impact. Supported by Gutzmann’s (2020) insights, which suggest that gender features on pronouns add a supplementary layer of meaning rather than being central to the main discourse, the findings indicate that gestures may allow pronouns to bind even with a gender mismatch, without altering the truth of the primary...

We are happy to announce a talk by Janek Guerrini (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: October 24, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Color adjectives: insights from Italian Abstract: When post-nominal, Italian adjectives have the range of readings that is familiar from English: ‘red pen’ may denote a red-inked pen, or a pen with a red outer surface. When pre-nominal, instead, Italian color adjectives can only target the visible part of objects denoted by the noun they modify – ‘penna rossa’ (‘red pen’, pre-nominal) can only denote a pen with a red outer surface. In this work, I argue that this systematic grammatical behavior is hard to account on most extant accounts of color adjective composition. I present a compositional analysis in the spirit of Szabó (2001), capturing both the context-sensitivity and the systematicity of color adjectives. In my approach, color adjectives...