Category: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Nico Löffler (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: July 3, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: The Meaning of the Russian Instrumental Case Abstract:  The instrumental case is probably the hardest case of the Russian language to be analysed semantically. Up to approximately 20 distinct uses have been assigned to it. Among them are the agent in passive constructions, a tool used in an action, a timeframe, and a property of an individual. It is this great variation in uses that makes it hard to give a concise formal analysis of the Russian instrumental. In my Bachelor’s thesis, I subsume the uses of the Russian instrumental under two distinct semantic classes and provide a syntactic and semantic analysis of each class. To achieve this, I preclude semantically deviant uses, namely internal arguments, frame-setting adjuncts,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Sotaro Kita (Warwick) 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: June 26, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Gesture, metaphor, and spatial language Abstract:  I will discuss how co-speech (i.e., speech-accompanying) gestures relate to language and conceptualisation underlying language.  I will focus on “representational gestures”, which can depict motion, action, and shape or can indicate locations (i.e., “iconic” and “deictic” gestures in McNeill’s 1992 classification). I will provide evidence for the following two points. Various aspects of language shape co-speech gestures. Conversely, the way we produce co-speech gestures can shape language. I will discuss these issues in relation to manner and path in motion event descriptions, clause-linkage types in complex event descriptions, and metaphor. I will conclude that gesture and language are parts of a "conceptualisation engine”, which takes advantage of unique strengths of spatio-motoric...

We are happy to announce a talk by Janek Guerrini (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: June 12, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Exhaustivity in maps Abstract:  Casati & Varzi (1999) propose a semantics for maps in which color patches work like predicates applying to map regions. For instance, the water marker covering a point on a map amounts to the claim “there is water in the real-world location referent of the map point”. Rescorla (2009) argued that the very treatment of maps as predicative is misguided because as soon as a marker appears on a map, its absence from a coordinate indicates that the corresponding location lacks the property denoted by this marker. According to Rescorla, predication in language is closer to Tarskian predicates, in that the truth of the sentence “Fido is a labrador” does not depend on whether...

We are happy to announce a talk by Lennart Fritzsche (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: June 5, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Modified head nods as a window into gradable commitment Abstract:  An interlocutor that is committed to a proposition p takes on the liability for the truth of p (Krifka, 2014; Viebahn, 2021). According to commitment-based approaches to assertion (e.g., Peirce, 1903; Krifka, 2014), an interlocutor that asserts p commits themselves to p. In recent philosophical literature, the idea has emerged that commitment is gradable (e.g., Marsili, 2014). For instance, a speaker is intuitively more committed to p when they assert undoubtedly p rather than just p (Wiegmann et al., 2022). In a similar vein, within semantic theory, Greenberg and Wolf (2018) proposed to interpret speech act operators as gradable by equipping Krifka’s (2014) ASSERT operator with a...

We are happy to announce a talk by Corien Bary and Harriet Yates (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 for the link.  Date: May 22, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: fEMG as a window into conversational commitments: validating the method and further applications (joint work with Bob van Tiel and Peter de Swart) Abstract:  This presentation explores the assignment of commitments in conversation. While theoretical work has explored the range of commitment-bearing acts, key questions remain unresolved, such as the role of addressees, the gradability of commitment, and the effect of evidentials. To empirically address these questions, we propose facial electromyography (fEMG) as a novel method in this field, to detect implicit affective reactions to commitment violations. We present our proof-of-method study which demonstrates that commitment violations elicit strong ‘frowning’ corrugator muscle activation (associated with negative affect). In an ongoing follow-up study we apply...