Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Investigating local readings of adjectives  Date: April 27, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I would like to report on the last chapter of my dissertation. In my dissertation I investigate the hypothesis that all adjective noun constructions involving local adjectives can be interpreted intersectively. This excludes non-local readings allowed by certain adnominal adjectives like possible, wrong and occasional (Larson, 2000; Schwarz 2006, 2020; Morzycki 2016). In previous talks in the colloquium, I addressed certain aspects of adjectives like skillful and argued for an analysis of these adjectives as context-dependent predicates. As a result, an intersective analysis is possible for such adjectives. However, there are further types of adjectives that are also local (in the sense of Schwarz 2020), but cannot receive an intersective analysis: temporal adjectives like former and modal adjectives like alleged. In this talk, I will...

We are happy to announce a talk by Volker Struckmeier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The many factors of ellipsis reconstruction – a multi-layered model Date: April 20, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Many theories try to explain the phenomenon of ellipsis interpretation and formation from the viewpoint of (mostly) single levels of linguistic description. All of these models have certain strong points.These successes in deriving empirical properties in ellipsis, in turn, makes their adherents attempt to specify more and more analytical restrictions and options in essentially the same framework, and with the same theoretical vocabulary, which yielded the initial advances. I will argue in this talk, that we should avoid overly specific analyses in which all (or almost all) relevant ellipsis descriptions stem from too few linguistic levels of representation. Instead of such single-level theories, I will propose an approach to ellipsis analysis which tries to combine strong points from each approach in a multi-layered...

We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Walter (Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language Date: February 9 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, the research agenda of the ViCom-project "Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language" will be presented. Perspective plays a crucial role in the interpretation of many utterances in everyday conversation. Usually, the perspective of the speaker is expressed, but there are cases where the perspective is shifted away from the speaker to some other salient individual. A prime example for this are instances of free indirect discourse (Schlenker, 2002; Maier, 2015). The expression of perspective is not limited to spoken and written language. It can also be expressed in speech-accompanying gestures (McNeill, 1992). There is only very little research on the interactions of perspective taking in gesture and speech, however (but see Hinterwimmer et al., 2021 and Ebert & Hinterwimmer,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Bücking (Siegen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: When the time of the story meets the time of the telling: On temporal metalepses from a linguistic perspective Date: February 2 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Following the introduction of the term into narratology by Genette (1983), Pier (2016, Sec. 1) defines narrative metalepsis as a „deliberate transgression between the world of the telling and the world of the told“. Perhaps the most famous example is the following, cited in Genette (1983, 235) from Balzac’s Illusions perdues, where the past time of the told story is said to overlap with the present time of the telling. (1) While the venerable churchman climbs the ramps of Angoulême, it is not useless to explain ... In my talk, I will tackle temporal metalepsis from a linguistic point of view. Specifically, I will ponder the merits and problems of four potential approaches to it, namely, literal interpretation, accommodation of imagination, accommodation of an operator...

We are happy to announce a talk by Klaus von Heusinger (Cologne) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Weak and strong definite articles in German and Evidentiality Date: January 26 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: German has a strong and a weak form of the definite article, which can be distinguished by their ability to merge with certain prepositions (strong: zu dem, weak: zum). The strong or full form is used in anaphoric and familiar contexts, and the weak or reduced form is used in contexts with a uniqueness condition (Ebert 1971, Schwarz 2009). The choice of one form in bridging contexts depends on the type of bridging: part-whole bridging contexts favor the weak form, and producer-product bridging prefer the strong form. We argue that the choice of the article form also depends on the way the speaker and hearer perceive the referent: if the referent is visible and touchable, the weak form is enhanced, while a less direct experience, say...