Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Morgan Moyer (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/62660316332?pwd=94KnkxFireEQFCWBGpi35ZwrClwoLa.1  Date: October 22, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Meaning Beyond Truth: A Psychosemantic Approach to Affective Meaning Abstract: How are different kinds of linguistic meaning represented and accessed in cognition? Research in semantics and pragmatics distinguishes truth-conditional content from presuppositions, conventional implicatures, and other kinds of non-at-issue meaning. Experimental pragmatics and psycholinguistics, meanwhile, investigates how linguistic information becomes available during comprehension, how pragmatic inferences unfold over time, and how semantic features organize conceptual representations. Yet the relationship between these linguistic distinctions and the cognitive status of the content they characterize remains poorly understood. This talk brings together two strands of experimental research to investigate this relationship. The first examines the cognitive prominence of affective valence relative to truth-conditional conceptual features. Using speeded categorization and similarity judgments, I investigate whether affective information is especially accessible and...

We are happy to announce a talk by Pascal Hohmann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Date: July 16, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Before what happens? NPIs and expletive negation in German bevor-clauses Abstract: German 'bevor' ('before') clauses are an unusual environment in which two superficially opposite, negation-related phenomena surface in one and the same syntactic frame. On the one hand, 'bevor'-clauses license negative polarity items (NPIs) — such as 'mit der Wimper zucken' 'bat an eyelid', '(einen) Mucks machen' 'make a peep', 'ein Wort sagen' 'say a word', or 'je' 'ever'. On the other hand, they host expletive negation (EN): a 'nicht' that, in the right context, does not reverse the truth conditions of the clause it appears in (Krifka 2010): (1) Ich gehe nicht nach Hause, bevor das (nicht) fertig ist. 'I won't go home before that is (not) finished.' — both variants truth-conditionally equivalent The talk pursues a semantic question: are...

We are happy to announce a talk by Prince Asiedu (Frankfurt) and a talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talks will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: July 2, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 7 pm c.t. (the two talks will be given consecutively within an extended colloquium slot.) Prince Asiedu (Frankfurt)  Title: Multimodal iconicity of ideophones and Co-speech gestures in Akan Abstract: Many spoken languages with diverse typological features have ideophones, a special class of words defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). Ideophones share certain morphological and semantic properties (Kita 1997, Dingemanse 2015, Barnes 2024, Ebert and Steinbach 2024). They are an open lexical class. They depict rather than describe. There is an iconic relationship between form and meaning. They are marked expressions with specific grammatical properties, such as reduplication. They lie in the domain of sensory imagery....

We are happy to announce a talk by Andy Lücking (Chemnitz) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: June 25, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: From Hand to Space: Decoding the Semantics of Iconic Gesture Abstract: Spatial gesture semantics takes seriously the dual nature of iconic gestures: they are both visuo-spatial events and objects of linguistic classification. The former is spelled out in terms of vector spaces, the latter in terms of classifiers. Linguistically classified gestures, in turn, can trigger the inference of implicatures, as is studied in discourse semantics. Hence, spatial gesture semantics draws on a range of standard semantic approaches, including (Davidsonian) event semantics, computational semantics, dynamic semantics, gesture studies, lexical and frame semantics, and -- of course -- vector semantics. This raises both concerns and aspirations for a unified formal account. The talk reviews (with a few improvements) spatial...