Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Nadine Bade (Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: January 18, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Linguistic Illusions Revisited: The Role of Maximal Informativity (Joint work with Vera Hohaus and Ryan Walter Smith, The University of Manchester) Abstract: Sentences like (1) have featured prominently in the psycholinguistics literature since Watson & Reich (1979) and are generally construed to mean that, regardless of their severity, all head injuries must receive medical attention (see also Sanford & Garrod 1998). A large body of literature has taken this interpretation, while robustly available, to be an illusion that obscures the literal interpretation of the sentence, under which all head injuries can be ignored (see also Higginbotham 1988 and Zimmermann & Sternefeld 2013). Evidence for such a view comes from the structurally parallel case in (2), which is...

We are happy to announce a talk by Vinicius Macuch Silva (Birmingham) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: December 21, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Talking numbers: Exploring the communication of quantity in English Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the communication of quantity. I will start by contextualizing quantity and its expression through language. Following this, I will present three empirical studies focused on quantity communication in English: two experimental psycholinguistic studies and one corpus-based one. The first study deals with multimodal quantifier interpretation (i.e., how the interpretation of several is modulated by gesture), the second one with the production of quantifiers in argumentative scenarios (i.e., how people use quantifiers such as some and most to make quantities appear large or small), and the third one with the usage of change-of-state verbs (e.g. expressions such as “rising prices”...

We are happy to announce a talk by Elena Herburger (Georgetown University) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Title: Negative Concord and NPI licensing: their semantic and historical relation Date: December 7, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk I ask how Negative Concord comes into existence and how it changes over time. Focusing largely on Romance, I explore how treating Negative Concord as but a name for a lexical ambiguity between a negative reading and a corresponding existential(-like) reading with the distribution of an NPI (e.g. Herburger 2001) can help shed light on the fact that Negative Concord terms often originate from NPIs, and can gradually come to be ‘more negative’. This process is argued to be more advanced in French than in Spanish, a difference that I attribute to a difference in the realization of sentential negation (no vs. pas)....

We are happy to announce talks by Narjes Eskandarnia and Kim Tien Nguyen (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 30, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Narjes Eskandarnia Title: Ideophones and Reduplication in Persian: An Exploration of the Dingemanse Hierarchy and Linguistic Creativity Abstract: The Present thesis explores the properties of Persian ideophones, explicitly focusing on their reduplication patterns and adherence to the Dingemanse Hierarchy. The study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of reduplication in creating ideophones and to investigate the extent to which Persian ideophones align with the hierarchical framework proposed by Dingemanse. The methodology employed in this research is a corpus linguistics approach. Accordingly, a corpus of approximately 300 ideophones and reduplicated words were collected from diverse sources, ensuring a comprehensive representation across different contexts. A table was created to categorize the ideophones, along with translations,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Wim Pouw (Nijmegen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche <fritzsche@em.uni-frankfurt.de> for the link.  Title: Gestural Darwinism Date: November 23, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: While it is clear what constitutes a success for picking up a cup to take a sip, some if not all non-conventionalized gestures "fail" to have (precise) conditions under which the function can be said to be realized.  If it is transparent what function is realized by the gesture, it is generally unclear why this gesture over others was used to realize the function. This issue is at the heart of gesture studies and makes it such that any gesture can be debated concerning its determinate meaning to a point the debate risks being meaningless. The issue is of course real - How do humans organize into a kinematic sequence, s, that realizes...