Author: Lennart Fritzsche

We are happy to announce a talk by Klaus von Heusinger (Cologne) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Weak and strong definite articles in German and Evidentiality Date: January 26 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: German has a strong and a weak form of the definite article, which can be distinguished by their ability to merge with certain prepositions (strong: zu dem, weak: zum). The strong or full form is used in anaphoric and familiar contexts, and the weak or reduced form is used in contexts with a uniqueness condition (Ebert 1971, Schwarz 2009). The choice of one form in bridging contexts depends on the type of bridging: part-whole bridging contexts favor the weak form, and producer-product bridging prefer the strong form. We argue that the choice of the article form also depends on the way the speaker and hearer perceive the referent: if the referent is visible and touchable, the weak form is enhanced, while a less direct experience, say...

We are happy to announce a talk by Maximilian Berthold (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:  Nominal aktionsarten: a formal account Date: January 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: During my last presentation, I proposed that nouns separate into two classes: stative nouns (person, child) and eventive nouns (murderer, dancer). At the center of the theory is the hypothesis that eventive nouns are characterized by having an event argument that can be anaphoric to salient events in the context. This allows us to account for previously unexplained cases in the literature on the temporal interpretation of nominals. The aim of the present talk is to (i) bring together the theory on eventive nouns with a theory on aktionsarten, (ii) propose a formal analysis for the semantics of each aktionsart, and (iii) test the predictions with respect to their temporal interpretations....

We are happy to announce a talk by Ramona Hiller (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: A Corpus Study on German Privative Adjectives based on joint work with Carla Spellerberg Date: December 8 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present a corpus-based study of nine counterfactual German adjectives that allegedly behave privatively which was conducted by a fellow student, Carla Spellerberg, and me in 2021. Since Partee’s (2010) influential suggestion that privative adjectives actually behave subsective on the coerced denotation of the noun they combine with, a lot of research has investigated the way these adjectives shift the noun denotation. Our intention with this thorough look at a large number of German adjective-noun combinations featuring alleged privative adjectives is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to learn more about noun shifts that can actually be observed in natural language when privative adjectives are involved and how often subsective and privative uses of the respective adjective occur. This allows us to add more much-needed empirical evidence to...

We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The first name/last name asymmetry - Update on the experimental design and a possible semantic analysis Date: December 1 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In my research I adopt the assumption that proper names are no different than common nouns. This assumption bears the name predicativism in the literature on proper names. For predicativists, proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g., ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. I believe that predicativism can provide potential insight into the way in which proper names interact with determiners in some languages, into the structure of proper names below the word level and into the structure of full names. The focus of this presentation will be to discuss my ongoing reflection on the semantics of last names (and, by extension, of full names). First, I will...