Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University) 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: Intensified vagueness: semantics and pragmatics Date: May 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: What, if anything, is the semantic content of intensifiers like 'very', 'extremely', 'pretty', etc.? In this talk, I'll explore this question from the perspective of recent probabilistic approaches to degree semantics (Lassiter and Goodman, 2017). According to such approaches, vague predicates involve lexical uncertainty that is partially resolved through pragmatic reasoning. A sentence like "Scarlett is tall" is interpreted as `height(s)>=t`, where the value of t is inferred. How can a framework like this be extended to deal with sentences like "Scarlett is very / extremely / surprisingly tall"? Starting point is the model of Bennett and Goodman (2018). In this model, the intensifier is semantically vacuous, but its presence in the utterance triggers a manner implicature, which constitutes the...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kathryn Barnes (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 At-Issue Status of Ideophones Date: May 6 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: It has long been acknowledged that words, phrases and sentences can all contribute information in di erent dimensions (cf. Grice 1975, Potts 2005). Constructions such as appositives, as well as expressives such as damn, have previously been shown to contribute not-at-issue information (cf. Potts 2005, Syrett & Koev 2014). Recent research into iconic enrichments has also focused on the at-issue status of these phenomena, with experiments on iconic co-speech gestures indicating that such gestures are default not at-issue (cf. Ebert, Ebert & Hörnig 2020, Tieu et al. 2017, Tieu et al. 2018). Similarly, it has been argued that ideophones, such as English splish-splash or German plitsch-platsch do not denote, but rather depict; instead of using arbitrary linguistic signs to refer to concepts, they iconically...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (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: Transparent Negation in Dynamic Semantics Date: April 29 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Dynamic semantic systems are designed to capture the truth-conditions of complete sentences as well as certain facts about anaphoricity. The second aspect is described in terms of discourse referents and accessibility: possible antecedents introduce discourse referents which may or may not be accessed by 3rd person pronouns, resulting in an interpretation that lets pronouns covary with their antecedent's contribution and hence, allowing for bound readings even with indefinite antecedents behind the clause boundary. Within these systems, negation usually plays the role of a plug: it blocks the projection of discourse referents within its scope and thus reders them inaccessible to subsequent anaphoric elements. But, as is well known, this leads to some predictions that are not bourne out:...

We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (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: Some consequences of proper names as predicates Date: April 22 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The literature on proper names is divided between two main analyses: referentialism and predicativism. The first analysis considers that proper names should be treated differently from other referring expressions as they have the property to refer rigidly (Kripke 1980) (i.e. they pick out the same individual across possible worlds). The second analysis takes proper names to be no different from other NPs. It assumes that proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g. ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and that they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. In my research, I side with the predicative analysis as I believe that it can...

We are happy to announce a talk by Patrick Grosz (University of Oslo) 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: What face emojis can teach us about language Date: February 18 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Face emojis are a means to integrate features of multimodal communication into written digital communication (exemplified for the happy face in the written message "is there coffee? 😀"). They appear to be digital counterparts of facial expressions, intonation in speech, or natural language expressions such as the interjections "wow", "ugh", and "yuck". Based on a semantic analysis of text-accompanying face emojis, this talk raises the question of what they can teach us about the accompanying text itself. In other words: what can we learn about language (as the traditional object of study in linguistics) from looking at face emojis? A particular focus in this talk will be on the anaphoricity of face emojis...