Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Petra Augurzky (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: Investigating effects of prosody and frequency on the on-line processing of quantified sentences – evidence from ERP studies on revision-sensitivity in German Date: January 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Recent studies have shown that compositional-semantic processing may sometimes proceed in a non-incremental manner. For instance, quantified sentences can exhibit considerable processing delays during on-line sentence comprehension. In my talk, I will introduce a series of ERP studies using picture-sentence verification that investigate such processing delays in sentences involving quantifier restriction in German. Overall, I will argue that the parser’s predictive capacity may sometimes lead to parsing delays associated with the on-line truth value assignment in a sentence. In the second part of the presentation, I will discuss two studies on contextual cues that might be used by the parser for overriding...

We are happy to announce a talk by Dolf Rami (University of Bochum) 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: A unified semantics for bare names and demonstratives Date: January 13 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that we not only have to distinguish bare from complex demonstratives, but also bare from complex proper names. In both cases, the semantics of the bare and the complex versions are significantly different, but nevertheless related. In this paper, I will mainly focus on a semantics for bare names and demonstrative. I will show that there are good reasons to consider them as close semantic relatives and I will propose a new use-sensitive formal semantics to account for their semantic relation, following and updating my investigations in this direction in Rami (2022)....

We are happy to announce a talk by Carla Umbach (University of Cologne) and Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) 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: Demonstratives of Manner, Quality and Degree – constraints on features of comparison  Date: December 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Demonstratives of manner, quality and degree occur across languages, e.g. Turkish böyle, Polish tak and German so (König & Umbach 2018). In (1) German so is used to express a quality modifying a car:  (1) (speaker points at a car):  Anna hat auch so ein Auto.  'Anna has a car like this, too.'  From the point of view of semantics, demonstratives of manner, quality and degree pose the problem of how to reconcile their demonstrative characteristics with their modifying capacity. Umbach & Gust (2014) suggest that these demonstratives are directly referential but express similarity (instead of identity) to the target of the demonstration gesture. Similarity is spelled out...

We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Weskott (University of Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium where he will present joint work with Johanna Klages, Elsi Kaiser, and Anke Holler. 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: Testing Perspectivization Effects Online: The Case of Counteridenticals Date: December 9 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Taking on another person's perspective is a fundamental part of human cognition. Linguistic expressions play an important role in perspectivization: they can signal a shift in perspective, and their interpretation can be sensitive to different perspectives (see Bylinina et al., 2015). Although there is quite a lot of literature on the semantics and pragmatics of perspective shifting and perspective sensitivity, experimental investigations of the comprehension processes involved is relatively sparse, especially with respect to online measures. In this talk, we present a visual word eye-tracking experiment in which participants were presented with linguistic stimuli that contained counteridenticals, i.e. counterfactuals of the form...

We are happy to announce a talk by Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place in a hybrid format. If you want to attend the talk on campus, you can just join us in IG 4.301. In case you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title:The interpretative options of anaphoric complex demonstratives Date: December 2 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present experimental evidence from a ‘yes’/’no’ judgement task and two acceptability rating studies (Experiments 1a-c) for the claim made in Hinterwimmer (2019) that sentences with two anaphorically interpreted complex demonstratives are less acceptable than sentences with two anaphorically interpreted definite descriptions and sentences where one of the two previously introduced referents is picked up by a complex demonstrative, while the other one is picked up by a definite description. The results of Experiment 1a and 1b are in principle compatible with the account argued for in Hinterwimmer (2019), according to which the...