CANCELLED – Talk by Kathryn Barnes (Frankfurt)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Kathryn Barnes (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Ideophones as iconic mixed items Date: May 25, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk outlines a semantic analysis of ideophones in German, such as plitsch platsch and holteridpolter, as iconic mixed items, combining both arbitrary descriptive meaning and iconic depictive meaning. These ideophones are therefore similar to expressive mixed items, such as cur or Köter, which combine at-issue descriptive and non-at-issue expressive meaning. The at-issue status of the two meaning components in ideophones can, however, vary according to various factors, as outlined in Barnes et al. (2022).  This analysis builds on the experimental work conducted by Barnes et al. (2022) on the at-issue status of sentence-medial adverbial ideophones in German, which showed that such ideophones were default non-at-issue, and provides an account for how said factors influence the at-issue status of ideophones. This iconic mixed items analysis could in future be applied to other...
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Talk by  Ken Hiraiwa (Meiji Gakuin University Tokyo) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by  Ken Hiraiwa (Meiji Gakuin University Tokyo) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: May 22 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: Sluicing and Countersluicing in Japanese Abstract: Ross (1969) showed that In sluicing, everything but a fronted wh-phrase is deleted. It has been controversial, however, how sluicing is derived in wh-in-situ languages like Japanese. I first outline Hiraiwa and Ishihara’s (2012) cleft analysis of sluicing, rejecting a wh-movement analysis (Takahashi 1994) and an in-situ analysis (Abe 2012). Crucial evidence comes from parallel patterns that immobile elements show in clefting and sluicing. After establishing that Japanese sluicing is built on clefting, I discuss what I call countersluicing. Countersluicing is a peculiar type of elliptical question in Japanese that is quite frequently used but has never been documented before. I show that it is exactly the opposite to sluicing in that (almost) everything but a wh-phrase survives deletion. I argue...
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Talk by Kurt Erbach (Frankfurt/Düsseldorf)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Kurt Erbach (Frankfurt/Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:Varieties of mass/count interpretation of hybrid nouns Date: May 11, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk takes a closer look at mass and count uses of nouns including hybrid (a.k.a dual life, flexible) nouns like "chocolate", "fence", and "rope" and shifts from count to mass like from "apple" ('whole piece of fruit') versus "apple" ('sauce'). In particular, we look at a range of uses of nouns like "apple" and "potato" that differ in their range of meanings compared to each other and compared to other nouns that are often used in both count and mass contexts like chocolate. We motivate an analysis in which there are differences in the mass meanings of certain nouns, contra analyses that assume mass has no meaning (e.g. Barner & Snedeker 2005; Borer 2005; Rothstein 2010; a.o.), and rather than relegate countability or "one"-ness...
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Talk by  Imke Driemel (HU Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by  Imke Driemel (HU Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person and on Zoom. Room IG 0.454 Date: May 12 (Friday not Monday!) Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch, and English child language Abstract: Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like Standard German and English consistently interpret sentences with negative concord as conveying a single semantic negation (Thornton et al. 2016, Nicolae and Yatsushiro 2020). Corpus-based investigations (Miller 2012, Thornton and Tesan 2013, Thornton et al. 2016, Nicolae and Yatsushiro 2020, Hein et al. 2023) for English, German, and Dutch show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. We review syntactic Agree-based analyses (Zeijlstra 2004, Zeijlstra 2011, Penka 2007, Penka 2011) and discuss the challenges they face in accounting for the typological variation and the child data. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of...
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