Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Wim Pouw (Nijmegen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Movements of signification: From physical origins to linguistic devices Date: June 2 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Manual gestures are bodily postures in motion which signify in coordination with speech. Gestures have primarily gathered attention from cognitive psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists, who are united under the umbrella of ‘gesture studies’. Gestures studies aims to triangulate what meaning lies behind a mere movement, inferring their significance through meticulous interpretation, where whole worlds have been envisaged about what makes movements meaningful: e.g., Gestures are held to reflect an inner world of sensorimotor simulations; Gestures are schematizations of thought; Gestures are primordial symbols. Such views have emancipated gestures, as unique windows into the human mind. We are, it turns out, not merely moving about. In this talk I will however stop for a moment to peer through gesture, and appreciate gesture qua movement. What do we see? We...

We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: A Neo-Heimian semantics for desire reports Date: May 19 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk I defend a Heimian semantics for desire reports. The basic idea in Heim (1992) is that conditionals play an essential role in the truth conditions of desire reports. I argue that if we take the idea of "hidden conditionals" quite literal and assume that conditionals not only play a role in the truth conditions but at the syntax-semantics interface in the object language (= Neo-Heimian), we have a key to a unified solution to two old and two new puzzles relating to conditional morphology in desire reports. First, it helps to explain the puzzling X-marking patterns we find in desire reports (cf. von Fintel & Iatridou (2017,2020)). Second, it gives us a plausible semantics for complement fulfilling conditionals (Williams (1974), Pesetsky (1991)). Third, it makes suprising...

We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Walter (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The at-issue status of character viewpoint gestures: An experimental investigation Date: May 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Gestures can encode perspective, meaning that they can depict an event from different viewpoints (McNeill, 1992). More specifically, researchers have distinguished between character and observer viewpoint gestures (CVGs and OVGs, respectively). While CVGs depict events from a selected person’s point of view that participated in the event, OVGs depict events as if observed from a distance. Moreover, CVGs usually involve the whole body. OVGs, by contrast, are normally only produced with the hands. In most formal semantic frameworks that model the semantic contribution of speech-accompanying gestures, it is claimed that they contribute not-at-issue meaning by default, i.e., they project and cannot be denied directly in discourse (Ebert & Ebert, 2014; Schlenker, 2018). This claim has been verified in an experimental study reported in...

We are happy to announce a talk by Nadine Bade (University of Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Word learning with visual animations as a window into the Triggering Problem — introducing a new paradigm Date: May 5 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss a new methodology using a word learning task with visual animations to approach the triggering problem for presuppositions, which is the long standing theoretical issue of predicting which entailments of natural language expressions end up presupposed. Recent literature discusses the need of an algorithm do determine what parts of meanings become presuppositions, that is an explicit rule that predicts a trivalent output (T,F, #) of a bivalent input (T, F) (Abrusán, 2011; Schlenker, 2021). Earlier arguments involving iconic presupposition triggers suggest that presuppositions are generated productively from iconic expressions, which could not encode the presupposition conventionally (Schlenker, 2019; Tieu et al., 2019; Schlenker, 2021). We conducted two pilot experiments using a word learning task with a change...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kat Barnes (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Subjectivity in iconicity: Ideophones and predicates of personal taste Date: April 28 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The perception of iconicity appears to be influenced by multiple factors including social and cultural conventions (cf. Dingemanse 2011), language experience (cf. Occhino et al. 2017; Sehyr & Emmorey 2019), and mostly notably speaker judgement. Kawahara (2020) noted the subjective nature of ideophones in Japanese and this also appears to be the case in German, where contradicting an ideophone appears to result in faultless disagreement as in (1). (1) a. Peter läuft die Treppe holterdiepolter herunter.           Peter runs the stairs IDEO down           'Peter is running helterskelter down the stairs.'     b. Naja, er läuft die Treppe nicht holterdiepolter herunter. Er läuft sie eher rumpeldipumpel runter.         INT he runs the stairs not IDEO down he runs them rather IDEO...