Talk by Eva Zimmermann (U Leipzig)

Dear colleagues, we are very happy to announce the next talk in our phonology colloquium this term. Eva Zimmermann (U Leipzig) will talk about "Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions". The talk will take place online. Title: Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions Time: 02. December 2020, 4 pm ct Place: Zoom Abstract below: Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions The assumption of Gradient Symbolic Representations that phonological elements can have different degrees of activity (Smolensky and Goldrick, 2016; Rosen, 2016; Zimmermann, 2018, 2019) allows a unified explanation for the typology of phonological exceptions. Exceptional (non)triggers and (non)undergoers of otherwise regular phonological processes are predicted from gradient constraint violations: The activation of a phonological element in an underlying morpheme representation determines 1) how much the element is preserved by faithfulness constraints and 2) how much it is visible for markedness constraints. I argue that this simple mechanism predicts the attested typology of phonological exceptions and that the predictions made...
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Talk by Fenna Bergsma (Frankfurt)

We are very happy to announce the next talk in our syntax colloquium this term. Fenna Bergsma will talk about "A typology of case competition in headless relatives". The talk will take place online, please see the information below on how to participate. Please not the change from our usual time! Title: A typology of case competition in headless relatives Time : 30.11.2020, 2 pm Place: Zoom (If you are not a regular member of the syntax colloquium and if you would like to listen to this talk, please contact Katharina Hartmann: k.hartmann@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de. You will be sent a link / ID to Zoom.) Please see below for the abstract. You are all, as always, cordially invited! ============================ A typology of case competition in headless relatives   In case competition in headless relatives two aspects play a role. The first one is which case wins the case competition. It is a crosslinguistically stable fact that this is determined by the case scale in (1). A case more to the right on...
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Talk by Ede Zimmermann (GU) – Thursday, May 14, 4-6pm

We are happy to announce another talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 14. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Propositionalisms Date: May 14th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: Roughly, propositionalism is the thesis that informational content is always truth conditional (Grzankowski 2013). In particular, the objects of psychological attitudes need to be propositions – in some sense, which includes propositional concepts (cf. Blumberg 2018) as well as perspectival content (Lewis 1979). Thus propsitionalists seek to reduce attitudes towards "intentional“ objects in terms of propositional attitudes: someone who is looking for a unicorn strives for it to be the case that he or she finds a unicorn (Quine 1956);...
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Talk by Ede Zimmermann (GU) – Thursday, May 7, 4-6pm

We are happy to announce a talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 7. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Extensions in compositional semantics Date: May 7th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: The talk scrutinizes the very notion of extension, which is central to many contemporary approaches to natural language semantics. The starting point is a puzzle about the connection between learnability and extensional compositionality, which is frequently made in semantics textbooks: given that extensions are not part of linguistic knowledge, how can their interaction serve as a basis for explaining it? Before the puzzle is resolved by recourse to the set-theoretic nature of intensions, new clarifying observations on extensions...
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Online-Talk by Jonathan Weinrich (GU) – April 23, Thursday 4-6 pm

We are happy to announce a talk by Jonathan Weinrich  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. If you didn't do so yet, send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before April 22. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Gestural referents as SDRT anaphora Date: April 23rd Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: Lascarides & Stone (2009) outline a semantic approach to interpreting gestures. They integrate the gestures into the SDRT framework of Asher & Lascarides (2003) and allow them to combine by discourse relations. This involves the usage discourse referents in a DRT-like fashion. While they do not explicitly advocate the idea, a possible interpretation of their examples suggests that all gestural discourse referents are restricted in coreference by the same structural constraints as pronouns. As a start of my research into...
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