Category: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Alexander Turtureanu (Berlin) 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 30, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Homogeneity from an MRT perspective Abstract: I my PhD dissertation, I develop a psychologistic approach to natural language semantics (MRT), which opens up a novel perspective on some traditional semantic topics and problems. In this talk, I will introduce some basic notions of MRT and describe how they give rise to an understanding of homogeneity that differs structurally from conventional truth-conditional-semantic accounts of this phenomenon: Instead of rooting homogeneity in the “lexical semantics” of definite plurals, I derive its emergence from the more basic question of how different semantic contexts determine the way speakers interpret the application of predicates to sets of individuals. ...

We are happy to announce a talk by Elin McCready (Tokyo) 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 16, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Norms of Language Use and Perspective Abstract: In this talk I argue that the perspectives agents hold — their ideologies, beliefs, and identities — can be extracted from their linguistic behavior. Specifically, because social meanings relate to speaker values and social beliefs, their language use tends to reflect these values. Taking such meanings and treating them in terms of self-ascription, together with norms of speech relating to how particular pieces of language are properly used, yields a `public perspective’ in partial correspondence to the notion of agential identity proposed in the recent philosophical literature....

We are happy to announce another 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: December 19, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Similatives as inherent generics Abstract: In this paper, I give an account of constructions expressing similarity such as like John and like a lawyer. The main point of the paper is that in like a lawyer, the indefinite receives a generic interpretation, which explains why under its most available reading, John looks like a lawyer is equivalent to John looks like a typical lawyer. However, this indefinite is generic in a surprising way. Generic quantification is standardly thought to be brought about by a silent quantificational adverb, Gen, bearing a meaning akin to generally (see e.g. Krifka et al. 1995). It is therefore expected, on the standard picture, that an indefinite that can receive generic interpretations should...