We are happy to announce a talk by Muyi Yang (UConn) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts.
Title: Iffy if: Japanese moshi in conditionals and related constructions
Date: January 21
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
Across languages, conditional antecedents can often be marked by elements that signal the speaker's sense of "iffiness" about the antecedent proposition, such as English if (von Fintel and Iatridou 2002), German falls (Hinterwimmer 2014) and sollte (Sode and Sugawara 2019). This talk concerns Japanese moshi, a marker in conditional antecedents that has been traditionally described as a signal of supposition. I will first investigate the distribution of moshi in various types of conditionals such as factual conditionals and unconditionals, and show that the iffiness expressed by moshi has to do with whether the antecedent proposition is in the common ground. I will propose a presuppositional account of moshi, and further extend the analysis to capture its use...
We are happy to announce a talk by Jeremy Kuhn (CNRS) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts.
Title: Boundaries in space and time: Iconic biases across modalities
Date: January 14
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
In cognition, spatial and temporal boundaries have been theorized to be central to humans' perception of objects and events. In language, a related semantic property has characterized the mass/count and telic/atelic oppositions, which have been argued to be grounded in these non-linguistic conceptual representations. Intriguingly, boundarihood has also been shown to be involved in a motivated mapping in sign language: telic verbs are associated with gestural boundaries.
In a series of experiments, we investigate the origin of this mapping bias. We show that non-signing subjects show an iconic bias to associate bounded forms with bounded meanings, and unbounded forms with unbounded meanings. The representations involved are abstract and domain general: the bias is found both for...
We are happy to announce a talk by Ahmad Al-Bitar (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts.
Title: 'Average': A unique modifier
Date: December 17
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
The modifier average has interestingly different uses, among which the ‘abstract’ use is the most well-studied. Carlson & Pelletier (2002), Kennedy & Stanley (2009) and Morzycki (2016) provide analyses of the famous example in (1-a). This sentence can be true without there being an individual with the impossible property of having 2.3 children. Hence the naming ‘abstract’.
(1) a. The average American has 2.3 children. (Abstract use)
b. The average age of the students is 21. (Abstract use)
This use is differentiated from another use called the ‘concrete’ use as in (2). While this use is compatible with both the definite and indefinite articles, the abstract use seems to (always) prefer the definite article; see (3-a) and (3-b). This preference can be unambiguously observed in Arabic...
We are happy to announce a talk by Kathryn Davidson (Harvard University) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts.
Title: Domain selection and the role of sign language loci
Date: December 10
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
In the study of the formal semantics of sign languages, significant attention has been given to the analysis of sign language loci, or the use of signing space to keep track of discourse referents. Notably, within formal frameworks, sign language loci have been used as evidence in favor of dynamic semantics as a case of overt variable indices, and they also share several properties in common with phi features. In this talk, I will focus on their pragmatic behavior, notably their low frequency in sign language corpora and production studies, and argue that the role of loci in contextual domain selection (for quantification, focus alternatives, and questions) has been overlooked. I will suggest an analysis...
We are happy to announce a talk by Nicole Gotzner (ZAS) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please note that the talk will already begin at 3 pm sharp.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts.
Title: The use and interpretation of gradable adjectives
Date:December 3
Time: 3 pm - 5 pm st
Abstract:
The use and interpretation of gradable adjectives
Gradable adjectives like tall are well studied in semantics (e.g., Kennedy, 2007) but the pragmatic inferences associated with such adjectives remain underexplored. The present talk targets the role of different semantic and contextual factors in the use and interpretation of bare and negated adjectives.
In the first part, I will demonstrate an interplay between the properties of the measurement scale underlying the semantics of adjectives and their associated implicatures (Gotzner, Solt & Benz, 2018a,b; Leffel, Cremers, Gotzner, & Romoli, 2019). Then, I present a novel experimental paradigm (Gotzner & Kiziltan, to appear) indicating that participants use distinct portions of a scale...