Author: Anke Himmelreich

We are very happy to announce the next last talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 16, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Johannes Mursell will talk about „Association with focus in German“. Abstract: In this talk, I discuss association with focus in German, i.e. examples like (1), mostly with respect to possible adjunction sites of the focus sensitive particle nur ‘only’. (1) Peter hat nur MARIA ein Geschenk gegeben. I will argue that the strong claim of Büring and Hartmann (2001) (B&H), building on early work from Jacobs (1983), can be maintained, namely that in German, nur can only be adjoined to extended verbal projections (VP/vP, TP, CP). I will pay particular attention to two problematic cases from the literature. Starting with extraposed CPs (Reis, 2005), the behavior of which forced B&H to weaken their proposal significantly, followed by a discussion of reconstruction data (Smeets and Wagner, 2018), I will show that B&H’s approach can easily account for the data when combined with some...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kristina Liefke  (Goethe Universität) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: Single-Type Semantics and Depiction Reports (joint work with Markus Werning, Bochum) Room: IG 4.301 Date: December 12th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: In this talk, we show that single-type semantics (see Liefke and Werning, 2018) provides a compositional semantics for physical and mental depiction reports (e.g. 'Paul is painting a penguin', 'Uli is imagining a unicorn') that improves upon Montague-style semantics (see Moltmann, 1997) and property-based semantics for such reports (see Zimmermann, 2016; cf. Zimmermann, 1993). In particular, single-type semantics accounts for missing de dicto-readings of depiction reports with a strong quantificational object DP, blocks unwarranted inferences to a common objective, and captures the semantic interaction of DPs and CPs in depiction complements. The semantics also makes a number of plausible predictions about the role of context in the interpretation of depiction complements and the subjectivity of depicted contents. ...

We are very happy to announce the next talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 9, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Francesco Pinzin will talk about „Latin verbal thematic vowels: aktionsart and overriding“. Abstract: Latin verbs show a set of vocalic elements before the Tense/Aspect/Mood morphemes, these elements are usually called Thematic Vowels (TVs): laud-ā-ba-m mon-ē-ba-m praise-tv1-impf-1sg advise-tv2-impf-1sg TVs are mostly analyzed as empty class markers, whose value is purely morphological (a.o., Aronoff 1994). The existence of syntactically and semantically empty morphemes logically requires the existence a post-syntactic and purely morphological step in the derivation where to insert them, call it Morphological Structure, as in Distributed Morphology models, or Paradigmatic/Morphomic level, as in Words and Paradigms models. In this presentation I argue that, as far as Latin TVs are concerned, there is no need for such a step. The distribution of Latin TVs with respect to the morphological base they select, the aktionsart semantics of the verb and...

We are happy to announce a talk by Ahmad Al-Bitar  (Goethe Universität) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: An in situ account for (Syrian Arabic) superlatives? Room: IG 4.301 Date: December 5th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: The sentence in (1) is given by Heim (1999, p. 7) and shown to have a reading that is problematic for any "in situ" analysis of the superlative. (1) John wants to climb the highest mountain. In addition to the absolute and relative readings, a third reading (called the "upstairs de dicto reading" by  Sharvit & Stateva (2000)), could be available for the superlative in (1). As Heim suggests, one can think of a survey conducted about "How high a mountain do you want to climb?". John says "I want to climb a mountain that is 6,000 m high"; Mary says "I want to climb a mountain that is 4,000 m high" and Bill says "I just want to climb a mountain that is 1,000...