Category: Semantics

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:  Nominal aktionsarten: a formal account Date: January 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: During my last presentation, I proposed that nouns separate into two classes: stative nouns (person, child) and eventive nouns (murderer, dancer). At the center of the theory is the hypothesis that eventive nouns are characterized by having an event argument that can be anaphoric to salient events in the context. This allows us to account for previously unexplained cases in the literature on the temporal interpretation of nominals. The aim of the present talk is to (i) bring together the theory on eventive nouns with a theory on aktionsarten, (ii) propose a formal analysis for the semantics of each aktionsart, and (iii) test the predictions with respect to their temporal interpretations....

We are happy to announce a talk by Ramona Hiller (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: A Corpus Study on German Privative Adjectives based on joint work with Carla Spellerberg Date: December 8 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present a corpus-based study of nine counterfactual German adjectives that allegedly behave privatively which was conducted by a fellow student, Carla Spellerberg, and me in 2021. Since Partee’s (2010) influential suggestion that privative adjectives actually behave subsective on the coerced denotation of the noun they combine with, a lot of research has investigated the way these adjectives shift the noun denotation. Our intention with this thorough look at a large number of German adjective-noun combinations featuring alleged privative adjectives is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to learn more about noun shifts that can actually be observed in natural language when privative adjectives are involved and how often subsective and privative uses of the respective adjective occur. This allows us to add more much-needed empirical evidence to...

We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The first name/last name asymmetry - Update on the experimental design and a possible semantic analysis Date: December 1 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In my research I adopt the assumption that proper names are no different than common nouns. This assumption bears the name predicativism in the literature on proper names. For predicativists, proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g., ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. I believe that predicativism can provide potential insight into the way in which proper names interact with determiners in some languages, into the structure of proper names below the word level and into the structure of full names. The focus of this presentation will be to discuss my ongoing reflection on the semantics of last names (and, by extension, of full names). First, I will...

We are happy to announce a talk by Caro Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: What is this teacher skillful at? Accounting for the meaning of skillful-type adjectives Date: November 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I would like to update on two aspects of a chapter of my dissertation. In the first part of the talk, I address the observation that when a skillful-type adjective combines with an individual denoting noun, the noun is able to serve as the basis for the interpretation of the adjective in some cases (e.g. in skillful teacher, which can be paraphrased as skillful as a teacher), and in others it is not able to do so (e.g. in skillful man, which cannot be paraphrased as skillful as a man). I will assume that this difference is due to an event variable being present in the semantics of teacher, but not man (see Rapp 2015, but compare Larson 1998,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Kind- vs. token-level modification Date: November 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: We use language to classify, subclassify, and simply group token entities, and also to attribute properties to the classes, subclasses and groups that we form. In this talk I examine the role of (mainly adjectival) modifiers in these function of language. There is ample evidence that languages distinguish grammatically between the use of modifiers to form a hierarchy of kind and subkind descriptions, to attribute ad-hoc properties to kinds (or subkinds), as well as to form subsets of entities of a given kind. I will survey various sorts of cases, focusing mainly on the elusive category of "relational" adjective, some challenges I have experienced in studying kind- vs. token-level adjectival modification, and some different techniques for exploring the different kinds of modification....