Category: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Agata Renans (Bochum) 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: November 20, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Bare singular and plural kinds: Kind formation across languages Abstract:  Languages with a singular-plural and mass-count distinction as well as overt definite and indefinite determiners are predicted not to allow bare singular kinds (Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004). Ga (Kwa) is such a language (Campbell 2017; Renans 2016a,b, 2018, 2021) and yet both bare singular and plural count nouns can obtain a kind reading: while bare plural form is preferred for entities that are frequently encountered by the Ga speakers, bare singular form is preferred for rarely encountered entities. Moreover, definite NPs can never obtain the kind reading. Thus the Ga data point to a new mechanism of kind formation and to a previously unattested variation in kind...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (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: November 13, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Non-normally modified descriptions and (non-)existence entailing predicates (joint work with Dolf Rami) Abstract:  Existence entailments are a recurring topic in philosophy of language. According to a widespread view, they arise due to the truthful use of the so-called "existential quantifier" (going back to W.V.O. Quine's slogan "to be is to be the value of a bound variable"). This talk presents our alternative to this view that focuses on the position variables occupy in the logical form of sentences. It argues that the presence of (non-)existence entailments depends on the type of argument position that the (more correctly:) "particular quantifier" binds  into. After a brief sketch of the general architecture of the theory, we present linguistic evidence in favor...

We are happy to announce a talk by Bartosz Więckowski (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: November 6, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Some reflections on double negatives and un-Adj antonyms Abstract:  Our understanding of the logical behaviour of double negatives like 'not unhappy'  depends on our understanding of antonymic pairs like 'happy'/'unhappy'. In the literature, their members are either construed as contraries  (e.g., Horn 2017) or contradictories (e.g., Krifka 2007). In my talk, I shall suggest, building on previous work on subatomic negation  and negative predication, how, on both ways of understanding un-Adj antonyms, the logic and semantics of double negatives can be approached from a proof-theoretic perspective....

We are happy to announce a talk by Cécile Meier (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: October 30, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Word-level TAM: the case of German Adjectives ending on „-lich“ Abstract:  I am going to present onging work from Project A02, a part of CRC 1629 NegLab. In the literature, there are different types of classifications mentioned for adjectives ending on „-lich“ in German. They differ in voice (active/passive), in modal force (necessity/possibility) and wrt actuality entailments (Bhatt, Hacquard on „be able to"). I am going to argue that „-lich“ lexicalizes parts of the clausal spine (TAM). Top down: The difference in actuality entailments follows from the assumption of a temporal  habituality operator that heads all the other nodes (Paslawska/von Stechow). Modals are interpreted force variable (Rullmann et al.). And voice is related to a difference in point-of-view aspect (imperfective/perfective, Rapp). Affixal negation may intervene between the habitually operator and the modal meaning component. The theoretical account of structural enrichment below the word-level follows the LF architecture for times and events (Beck/von Stechow)....

We are happy to announce a talk by Camila Antônio Barros (Berlin) and Vinicius Macuch-Silva (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: October 23, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Time commitment: ways gesture can be placed in time Abstract:  In this talk, we discuss different types of synchrony between gesture and speech, an issue that has been at the center of work on gesture-speech coordination. Based on McNeill (1992), we present an empirical investigation of how gesture and speech can be synchronized at the phonological, semantic, and pragmatic levels, drawing on a corpus study as well as on an experimental study. In the corpus study, we investigate the overlap between gesture and speech in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, looking at representationality and the synchrony of gesture relative to phonological anchors. The results show that the overlap between a word and a stroke...