Category: Talks

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: October 24, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Color adjectives: insights from Italian Abstract: When post-nominal, Italian adjectives have the range of readings that is familiar from English: ‘red pen’ may denote a red-inked pen, or a pen with a red outer surface. When pre-nominal, instead, Italian color adjectives can only target the visible part of objects denoted by the noun they modify – ‘penna rossa’ (‘red pen’, pre-nominal) can only denote a pen with a red outer surface. In this work, I argue that this systematic grammatical behavior is hard to account on most extant accounts of color adjective composition. I present a compositional analysis in the spirit of Szabó (2001), capturing both the context-sensitivity and the systematicity of color adjectives. In my approach, color adjectives...

*CANCELLED* We are happy to announce a talk by Paul Koenig (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 24, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Scale theory in adjective semantics Abstract: Gradable adjectives cause difficulties in the analysis of their semantic and logical form due to different phenomena such as references to comparative classes, dimensional references, units of measurement, factor phrases and norm references. How the constants of the semantic form relevant for graduation are represented in the logical form, taking into account the factors mentioned, is part of the work of Bierwisch (1987), on which the approaches in this paper are based. The main objective is to use a new definition of directed intervals to specify the definitions given in Bierwisch 1987, which are intended to provide a mathematical/logical framework for the representation of the logical form, and to close problems that...

We are happy to announce a talk by Nadine Bade (Potsdam) 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 11, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Shared mechanisms behind matrix and embedded implicatures — evidence from priming Abstract: There is an ongoing debate in the literature on implicatures regarding what mechanisms are behind their derivation. Specifically, theories make different predictions for the role of different types of alternatives in implicature computation. More recently, this question has been tackled in the experimental literature by making use of a priming paradigm (Chemla & Bott, 2016, Rees & Bott 2018, Waldon & Degen 2021, Marty et al. 2024). I will offer an extension of the existing priming paradigm which includes embedded (downward-entailing) cases as well as cases highlighting the alternative visually (or not). The results suggest that both influence the rate to which implicatures are derived. I will...

We are happy to announce a talk by Carla Spellerberg (Amherst) and Carolin Reinert (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 4, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Nouns and their typical activities Abstract: In this talk, we present parts of our ongoing joint work on the semantics and processing of English adjective noun constructions such as the following: (1) a. Mary is a skillful dancer. b. Mary is a skillful ballerina. c. Mary is a skillful person. d. Mary is a skillful beginner. We assume that adjectives like skillful are underspecified, and capture this by means of a parameter in the semantics of these adjectives. Moreover, we assume that value of this parameter is supplied as a default by world knowledge associated with certain nouns, or is supplied by the context of utterance. We are interested in the (in)ability of nouns to provide a default interpretation: while...