Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Maciej Kłeczek (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Quine on variables Date: July 15 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this exegetical talk we reconstruct and critically discuss the Quine view on variable like symbols and first-order variables. This is a quintessential Quinean theme found in a series of papers [On the Logic of Quantification, Variables Explained Away, The Variable, Algebraic Logic and Predicate Functor Logic], and Quine’s seminal monograph Word Object. Quine has presented a rather coherent picture of variable like symbols and first-order variables. As a consequence, this picture generates a coherent interpretation of first-order languages conforming to an important Quine’s background philosophical assumption which is nominalism (or rather a propensity to nominalism).  We start our talk with Quine’s account of schematicity and contrast it with alternative more recent approaches. Next, we proceed to Quine’s explication of a first-order variable as a...

We are happy to announce a talk by Todor Koev (University of Konstanz) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: "Believe" as Gradable, Strong, and Subjective Date: July 1 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The verb "believe" is standardly analyzed as a universal quantifier over possibilities, i.e. as stating that the prejacent is true across all the attitude holder’s doxastic alternatives (Hintikka 1969). This semantics (i) fails to capture the fact that "believe" is a gradable predicate (cf. "partially believe", "fully believe", etc.) and (ii) does not predict the intuition that "believe" implies some sort of weakness on the part of the attitude holder towards the prejacent proposition (cf. "I believe Kim is on vacation" vs. "I know Kim is on vacation"). In order to remedy the gradability problem, I propose a gradable semantics for "believe" within the framework developed for gradable adjectives (Cresswell 1976; Kennedy & McNally 2005; a.m.o.). As for the modal strength problem, I claim that "believe" has the...

We are happy to announce a talk by Alexander Wimmer (University of Tübingen) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Minimal sufficiency as implicature cancellation Date: June 17 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In his 2012 dissertation, Patrick Grosz assumes two kinds of ONLY, an exclusive and a non-exclusive one, which he also refers to as minimal sufficiency ONLY, henceforth MS-ONLY. German NUR ‘only’ in conditional antecedents is noted by him to be ambiguous between MS- and exclusive ONLY. One factor that clearly disambiguates in favor of MS-ONLY is the insertion of certain particles in the consequent. Consider the following example:  (1)        Heinrich ist (schon / selbst / auch) froh, wenn nur DREI Katzen kommen.             Henry is (already / even / also) glad if only THREE cats come The particles SCHON, SELBST and AUCH, henceforth referred to as EVEN-particles, enforce a reading on which Henry is also happy if more than three cats are around. Such particles are...

We are happy to announce a talk by Maximilian Berthold (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: The anaphoricity of German temporal adjectives Date: June 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: German offers a rich inventory of temporal adjectives that serve to locate the time at which the property denoted by the noun hold of its referent. This talk investigates the semantic properties of the German adjective damalig (‘at the/that time’) which appears to have an anaphoric meaning component. Such anaphoricity would require any noun phrase modified by damalig to be supplied with a reference time by the context. This raises the questions how these noun phrases are temporally interpreted and how damalig is analyzed in a semantic framework. I provide empirical evidence that the interpretation of damalig-noun phrases is contextually determined which motivates my hypothesis that damalig should be analyzed as a time pronoun. The investigation of an anaphoric...

We are happy to announce a talk by Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Presupposition Projection and Linear Order – Variation Across Connectives Date: May 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The role of linear order for presupposition projection is a long-standing matter of theoretical controversy and empirical confusion. On the one hand, there’s a natural association of the `left-to-right’ unfolding of the linguistic signal and the gradual update of the contexts relative to which subsequent expressions are interpreted. On the other hand, connectives seem to display varying behavior in terms of whether later material can affect presuppositions of earlier expressions. In particular, conjunction has often been taken to be asymmetric with regards to projection, only allowing `left-to-right’ filtering (e.g., with the first conjunct supporting a presupposition in the second conjunct), whereas disjunction seems to also allow the reverse `right-to-left’ filtering (as in Partee’s `bathroom sentences’)....