Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Cécile Meier (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Arbitrary mapping and object frequency: On cars and airplanes  Date: April 21 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Usually, the meaning-form relation of count nouns is thought to be arbitrary. This paper argues that object frequency in image data sets correlate with the type of reading of count nouns (taxonomic reading and specimen referring reading). If an object is rare in image data sets it is accessible to a taxonomic reading and an atomic kind reading derived from that reading. If an object is frequent in image data sets (and the objects are not similar to each other) a taxonomic reading is not available. If object frequency is relevant for visual perception and its reflex in semantic memory is relevant for the range of semantic types of count nouns then the semantic type (a formal linguistic feature) must be iconic....

We are happy to announce a talk by Jacopo Romoli (Univerity of Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title:Implicating in semi-cooperative contexts (joint work with Paul Marty, Yasutada Sudo, and Richard Breheny) Date: February 17 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In ordinary conversations, disjunctive sentences like June visited Frankfurt or Düsseldorf are commonly understood as conveying that she didn’t visit both cities (exclusivity), and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two cities she visited (ignorance) (Grice 1975, Gazdar 1979, Horn 1972 a.o.). There is general consensus that these inferences are not conveyed as part of the literal meaning, but rather they arise as implicatures. On the standard pragmatic approach, implicatures are the output of implicit reasoning on the part of the hearer over why the speaker said what she said and why not something else (Grice 1975, Horn 1972, Gazdar 1979, Sauerland 2004, Geurts 2010, Chemla 2010, van Rooij &...

We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Nominal Aktionsarten Date: February 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Based on a convincing amount of semantic properties shared by verbal tense and the German temporal adjective damalig, I concluded in my last presentation that the adjective is a functional nominal tense. In this talk, I want to address what initially appear to be semantic differences between damalig and verbal tense. First, intuitions may suggest that damalig exhibits semantic restrictions with particular types of nouns such as die damalige Milch (‘the milk at the time‘). Second, German native speakers share the intuition that sentences such as Der damalige Taxifahrer sang die ganze Fahrt ('The taxi driver at the time sang the whole ride) is odd in contexts in which damalig‘s reference time is close to the time of utterance (e.g., yesterday/last week). This behavior would be undesirable if we maintain...

We are happy to announce a talk by Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers University) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Pointing in spoken and signed languages Date: February 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Pointing is a gesture that occurs early in development and continues to be used with language in both spoken and signed languages. The different distributional and interpretational properties of pointing in the two modalities of language raise the question of whether there is one or many kinds of pointing found across languages and developmental stages. In this talk, I propose a unified analysis of pointing, where it is analyzed as a locational restriction. I argue that the differences observed in the two modalities of language can be derived from assuming a general restriction against cross-modal composition and discuss its implications on the use of pointing and deictic reference....

We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: The compositionality of adjective noun constructions – The role of context-dependence Date: January 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: There are two major proposals discussed in the literature regarding the question how adjectives are to be analyzed semantically: (i) adjectives are predicates or (ii) adjectives are modifiers (see, e.g., Montague 1970, Kamp 1975). While adjectives like red are analyzed as predicates, adjectives like tall and skillful need a more complex approach and receive a modifier analysis. However, there are alternatives on the market: for gradable adjectives like tall, complex predicate analyses such as the measure function approach (see, e.g., Kennedy 1999, 2005, Kennedy&McNally 2005) have been developed, building on the observation that such adjectives are dependent on a comparison class. As a consequence of the analysis as a complex predicate,...