Author: Anke Himmelreich

We are very happy to announce the next talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 2, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Katharina Hartmann will talk about „Generalizing MaxElide“. Abstract: In this talk I argue that the constraint MaxElide (Merchant 2008) is more general than originally assumed. I show for German that MaxElide constrains all types of ellipsis in coordination and comparative formation. I conclude that this is compatible with movement accounts, rather than with base-generation + deletion accounts, of the respective structures.   You are cordially invited!...

Katharina Hartmann (Goethe University Frankfurt), Malte Zimmermann (University of Potsdam) and Doreen Georgi (University of Potsadam) co-organize the workshop Structural Asymmetries in African Languages on April 27-28, 2020 at the University of Potsdam. Deadline for abstract submission: December 31, 2019....

We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode. Please find an abstract below. Title: „Gut“ as a predicate of worlds Room: IG 4.301 Date: November 28 Time: 4pm – 6pm Abstract: In this talk I discuss the meaning of the evaluative adjective „gut“ when combined with finite „dass“ (‚that‘)- and „wenn“ (‚if‘)-clauses as in (1). (1)    a. Es ist       gut,  dass du   gehst.             It be.IND good that  you go.IND         b. Es ist       gut,   wenn du   gehst.             It be.IND good if        you go.IND         c. Es wäre     gut,   wenn du   gehen würdest.             It  be.SUBJ good if        you go      will.SUBJ The focus of this talk will be on the rules of use of these sentences against a given conversational background and how they can be derived from a semantics for „wenn“/“dass“ and IND/SUBJ under the assumption that „gut“ is a ‚regular‘ gradable adjective – with a twist: It takes a world argument in its subject position....

We are very happy to announce the next talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, November 25, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Doreen Georgi (Potsdam) will talk about „On two types of resumption in Igbo and the nature of islands“. Abstract: We provide novel data from Igbo (Benue-Kwa, Nigeria) which show that the languages has two types of resumptive pronouns (RPs) in A-dependencies: RPs that occur at the bottom of dependencies that involve (a) base-generation (topicalization) and (b) movement (wh/focus fronting). While it has been argued before that different kinds of RPs can co-exist in a language (a.o. Borer 1984, Aoun et al. 2001, Bianchi 2004, Sichel 2014), the evidence is usually based on subtle reconstruction effects in relative clauses. Igbo exhibits movement RPs in wh/fronting and provides additional evidence e.g. from morpho-phonological cyclicity effects. The use of RPs in movement dependencies is restricted to just a few contexts. We argue that these RPs surface in order to fulfill PF-requirements (realization of oblique case...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jonathan Weinrich (Goethe Universität) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: Towards the Correct Pragmatic Treatment of Iconic Co-Speech Gestures Room: IG 4.301 Date: November 21st Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: There are two proposals of classifying iconic co-speech gestures within terms of previously established kinds of meaning. While Ebert & Ebert (2014) treat them as supplements in the spirit of Potts (2005), Schlenker (2018) analyzes them as variety of presuppositions. The main criterion for evaluation will be whether the contribution made by the gesture is discourse-new or discourse-old. After a quick explanation of the previous accounts, key examples of co-predicate gestures that pose a problem or an open question for both proposals are presented, establishing observations useful for a correct formalization. Instances of informative co-speech gestures pose a problem for the cosuppositional account, and uninformative ones for the supplemental one. Both accounts are hardly falsifiable: While the one of Ebert & Ebert...