Talk by Caro Reinert (Frankfurt)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
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,...
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Two talks by Marie-Joe Kallab (GU Frankfurt) and Melissa Jeckel (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce two talks by Marie-Joe Kallab (GU Frankfurt) and Melissa Jeckel (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 07 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title (Marie-Joe-Kallab): Negation in Lebanese Arabic Abstract: In this talk, I present my Thesis about Negation in Lebanese Arabic. I focus on sentential negation, their syntactic expression, and the interpretation of multiple negation in the Lebanese dialect, based on Zeijlstra’s (2004) research. I demonstrate the three different negative constructions in the language, which are single negation, bipartite negation, and enclitic negation. Furthermore, I argue that Lebanese Arabic is a Strict Negative Concord language as well as a Non-Strict Negative Concord language. There is a difference between positive and negative imperatives regarding person agreement, which suggests the usage of surrogate imperatives. Lebanese Arabic exhibits a diachronic change that argues in favor of Jespersen’s (1917) claim that languages develop regarding negation and how sentential negation is expressed.  I suggest that...
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Talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
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....
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Talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take online over Zoom. Please enroll in the OLAT course of the syntax colloquium to get the link or write to Katharina Hartmann. Titles: More is going on upstairs than downstairs: There is a penthouse in Kuce Date: October 31 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, we investigate polar interrogatives in Kuce (Kuche) or Ce (Che), a minority Plateau (Benue-Congo) language spoken in north-central Nigeria. The language employs a clause-final vowel lengthening strategy in polar questions (1-2). We, therefore, argue that: (a) the vowel quality of the question marker is determined by the final vowel of the clause; (b) the polar interrogative marking follows a strict-finality constraint; (c) the phenomenon is a main clause phenomena and (d) it is unavailable in focus construction. We show that unlike many lax prosodic languages with a single/uniform vowel, polar question marking....
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Talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Interpretation and placement of English -ly adverbials: a case for a new quantitative approach Date: October 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The interplay of position and interpretation of adverbials has received considerable attention over the last 20 years. But even for English, there is no clear consensus on which readings need to be distinguished, which orderings of adverbials are grammatical, and whether, in the case of -ly adverbials, the semantic analysis should be based on the semantics of the base form or not. The aim of my talk is to discuss the ways quantitative measures like collocations and distributional semantics can be leveraged to clarify this picture. After an overview of the problems, I will discuss three case studies illustrating three different approaches. The first case study shows that collocations of the base adjectives in attributive position annotated for the ontological category of the head allow a more finegrained look at the consistency of...
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