Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (GU) and Christian Ebert (cabuu GmbH) next W E D N E S D A Y at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Please note that you need to register beforehand. Please send a mail to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before Wednesday 3pm. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on W E D N E S D A Y at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Pointing and its meaning Date: June 3rd Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: We propose a compositional analysis of pointing plus different speech expressions (indefinites, definites, and demonstratives in particular), where the pointing gesture has a fixed ‚lexical‘ semantics and contributes a certain conventional meaning depending on its accompanying phrase. As for pointing gestures with demonstratives, we argue that demonstratives can be analysed as semantically vacuous entities that only function as ‘dimension shifters’ from the non-at-issue to the at-issue dimension. The (‚lexical‘)...

We are happy to announce a talk by Alda Mari (Paris) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Please note that you need to register beforehand. Please send a mail to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before thursday 3pm. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Subjunctive belief:  the common-ground-as-default-rule and its pragmatic effects Date: May 28th Time: 4pm – 6pm — Abstract: In contrast to most other Romance languages, `believe‘ commonly and prescriptively takes subjunctive in Italian, though indicative is found as well, the choice of indicative or subjunctive has semantic effects. We show that the indicative with `believe‘ is used when the belief statement describes the personal mental state of the holder of the attitude, an interpretation that follows from the traditional Hintikkean semantics. In contrast, we show that subjunctive with `believe‘ is used to mark a relation between the content of belief and the discourse context.  To...

We are happy to announce another talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 14. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Propositionalisms Date: May 14th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: Roughly, propositionalism is the thesis that informational content is always truth conditional (Grzankowski 2013). In particular, the objects of psychological attitudes need to be propositions – in some sense, which includes propositional concepts (cf. Blumberg 2018) as well as perspectival content (Lewis 1979). Thus propsitionalists seek to reduce attitudes towards "intentional“ objects in terms of propositional attitudes: someone who is looking for a unicorn strives for it to be the case that he or she finds a unicorn (Quine 1956);...

We are happy to announce a talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 7. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Extensions in compositional semantics Date: May 7th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: The talk scrutinizes the very notion of extension, which is central to many contemporary approaches to natural language semantics. The starting point is a puzzle about the connection between learnability and extensional compositionality, which is frequently made in semantics textbooks: given that extensions are not part of linguistic knowledge, how can their interaction serve as a basis for explaining it? Before the puzzle is resolved by recourse to the set-theoretic nature of intensions, new clarifying observations on extensions...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before April 29. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Transparent Negation: Retroactive specification and zilch Date: April 30th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: Judging from examples like the following, negation seems to be capable of blocking the accessibility of potential antecedents in its scope for anaphoric pronouns in subsequent discourse.   (1) No man walks in the park. *He whistles. (2) Peter doesn't own a car. *It's too expensive. On the other hand, there are several examples that cast some doubt on this assessment, be it the ease with which referential expressions outscope negation or the impact on further negation, just to name a few:   (3) Peter didn't...