Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Aleksandra Ćwiek (ZAS Berlin) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Sorting the Mischmasch of German Ideophones Date: November 25 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Most of the articles or lectures on ideophones begin with quoting Mark Dingemanse’s work. This one will be no different. An ideophone is “a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse, 2019, 16). Words like boing or swish evoke a sense of sound and movement, respectively. However, Indo-European languages have been called “ideophonically impoverished” (Diffloth, 1972, 440; Nuckolls, 2004). In this project, I tackle this problem by inspecting the breadth of ideophones in German. I will present a data set of German ideophones that my colleagues and I collected from children’s books. Overall, we collected a total of 1,020-word forms and 650 lemmas, i.e., unified word forms. In this talk, I will present the data and discuss some further ideas to refine it. In addition,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (University of Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Desire reports and conditionals Date: November 18 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Heim (1992) proposes a semantics for desire reports which “sees a hidden conditional in every desire report.” Since Heim’s proposal doesn’t share many of the short-comings of a Hintikka-semantics for desire reports, it has subsequently been adopted by many authors. Interestingly, the idea of hidden conditionals – “[a]n important feature of this analysis” (Heim, 1992) – has been marginalized, e.g., Portner & Rubinstein (2020); Giannakidou & Mari (2021), or explicitly rejected, e.g., Levinson (2003); Villalta (2008); Lassiter (2011, 2017), in subsequent work. The connection between desire reports and conditionals has recently received new attention: von Fintel & Iatridou (2017, 2020) observe that in many languages the morphology that is used to mark a conditional as counterfactual features prominently in reports of “unattainable wishes” (von Fintel & Iatridou, 2020). What is...

We are happy to announce a talk by Markus Steinbach (University of Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Visual answers - response strategies in German Sign Language Date: November 11 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Response particle systems vary cross-linguistically regarding the number and discourse functions of the response elements. Some languages have two particles (English yes, no), others have three (German ja, nein, doch). Traditional accounts of response systems distinguish truth-based and polarity-based systems (Pope 1976, Jones 1999). In truth-based systems, yes-type answers confirm the truth of the antecedent proposition and no-type answers reject it. In polarity-based systems, response particles signal the polarity of the response clause: positive (yes-type) or negative (no-type). Languages may also employ both systems and use no to reject the truth of a proposition or signal the negative polarity of the response. Languages with a three-particle system often have a dedicated response particle for rejecting negative propositions, although other dedicated particles exist, too (Roelofsen & Farkas 2015). Concerning the visual-gestural modality, very little...

We are happy to announce a talk by Marianne Huijsmans and Daniel Reisinger (University of British Columbia) in the Semantics Colloquium. Please note that the talk will place online. If you want to participate, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de beforehand. Title: Demonstratives in ʔayʔaǰuθəm: Managing joint attention through gesture and salience Date: November 4 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, we provide the first detailed description and analysis of the demonstrative system in ʔayʔaǰuθəm (a.k.a. Comox-Sliammon; ISO 639-3: coo), a Coast Salish language spoken along the northern Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing from original fieldwork with five speakers, we show that the demonstratives in ʔayʔaǰuθəm not only encode deictic distance, evidentiality, gender, and number, but also whether or not joint attention (cf. Diessel 2006) has been established between the speech participants. The Gesture Demonstratives rely on the use of co-speech gesture to establish joint attention, while the Salience Demonstratives are used where joint attention is already established and, consequently, do not require...

We are happy to announce a talk by Narjes Eskandarnia (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. Please note that the talk will place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Georgian and Persian linguistic contact in Fereidounshahr (Isfahan, Iran) Date: October 28 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: A variety of Georgian language—which is of Caucasian language family—is widely spoken in the city of Fereidounshahr in the Isfahan Province, Iran. Due to many centuries of close contact between the Georgian and Persian languages, the Georgian language spoken in the area has undergone some considerable changes. In this regard, the current fieldwork aims to deal with and describe the linguistic changes. The data were collected through the field research method by applying Iran’s Academy Questionnaire to the norm speakers of Fereidounshahr. The findings demonstrate that the Georgian language of Fereidounshahr is widely influenced by the Persian language at different linguistic fields such as phonology, morphology and semantics. ...