Category: Semantics

*** The talk is now taking place virtually via Zoom. Please contact Lennart Fritzsche <fritzsche@em.uni-frankfurt.de> for the link. *** We are happy to announce a talk by Maximilian Berthold (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: On nominal tense and aspect Date: November 16, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Nominals contribute temporal information which may be independent from that of the verb phrase. Some languages, such as Paraguayan Guaraní, offer an inventory of morphological markers on argument nouns which encode a temporal meaning that affect the temporal interpretation of the noun phrase with which they appear. This gives rise to the question whether there are instances of tense or aspect within the nominal domain. Previous research states that nominal aspect markers exist in Paraguayan Guaraní as well as English; although, the degree of grammaticalization varies between the languages. In contrast, it has been claimed that, to date, no reliable evidence for the existence of a nominal tense...

We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert, Kurt Erbach and Magnus Poppe (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Experimental findings for a cross-modal account of dynamic binding in gesture-speech interaction Date: November 2, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In our talk, we theoretically and experimentally discuss dynamic semantic phenomena of pronoun and presupposition binding and point out how these phenomena reappear in the domain of gesture-speech interaction. Building on the unidimensional dynamic approach of Ebert & Ebert (2014) (based on Anderbois’ et al. (2015) account for handling appositive meanings), we suggest a cross-modal account where pointing gestures and iconic gestures introduce discourse referents for rigid designators that can be anaphorically picked up by pronouns (expressed in speech or gesturally). One option for the introduction of gestural discourse referents is by fixing a certain locus in the gesture space that stands for the gesture concept and can serve for further anaphorical uses. We will discuss such...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kurt Erbach (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: (Non-)Existence entailments of predicates (joined work with Dolf Rami) Date: October 26, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Object mass nouns like "furniture" and "equipment" are a focal point of countability research because they refer to intuitively countable objects but grammatically pattern with nouns that don't: "mud", "concrete", etc. One of the primary ways in which theories of countabiltiy differ is in their treatment of object denotation (as opposed to substance denotation) and how this interacts with other semantic operations. Despite all of these assumptions, little experimental work has been done on the conditions under which object mass nouns are acquired. This talk presents several experiments designed to test how it is that object mass nouns are acquired....

We are happy to announce two talks by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) and Kathryn Barnes (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Date: July 6, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Julien Foglietti Title: What’s in a last name? Semantics and experimental update Abstract: In this talk I will present further support to my proposal that last names used referentially carry a family membership presupposition. In the first section, I will walk us through the presupposition tests (Karttunen, 1973) applied to the use of referential last names. I will also introduce a new experimental design – inspired by Tonhauser (2012) – which will bring experimental support to my proposal.  In the second section of the talk, I will present the results of my previous experiments. These results show that; indeed, the notion of family membership is linked with how we use last names in referential expressions. Furthermore, these results will also open the question of how the content of the presupposition that...

We are happy to announce two talks by Sebastian Walter (Wuppertal) and Cécile Meier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Date: June 22, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Sebastian Walter Title: Are there salience differences between character and observer viewpoint gestures? Abstract: The present study investigates salience differences between character viewpoint gestures (CVGs) and observer viewpoint gestures (OVGs). Since co-speech gestures usually contribute not-at-issue meaning by default (cf. Ebert et al., 2020) and are thus backgrounded, it was hypothesized that there is no salience difference between CVGs and OVGs. A forced-choice study was conducted to investigate this hypothesis. The results show that there is no significant difference between CVGs and OVGs. Although further research is needed to fully clarify this matter, it is tentatively concluded that there is no difference in salience between the two gesture types. Therefore, the results of previous studies that found an overall preference for CVGs compared to OVGs (Hinterwimmer et al., 2021)...