Category: Talks

We are happy to announce another talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 14. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Propositionalisms Date: May 14th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: Roughly, propositionalism is the thesis that informational content is always truth conditional (Grzankowski 2013). In particular, the objects of psychological attitudes need to be propositions – in some sense, which includes propositional concepts (cf. Blumberg 2018) as well as perspectival content (Lewis 1979). Thus propsitionalists seek to reduce attitudes towards "intentional“ objects in terms of propositional attitudes: someone who is looking for a unicorn strives for it to be the case that he or she finds a unicorn (Quine 1956);...

We are happy to announce a talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 7. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Extensions in compositional semantics Date: May 7th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: The talk scrutinizes the very notion of extension, which is central to many contemporary approaches to natural language semantics. The starting point is a puzzle about the connection between learnability and extensional compositionality, which is frequently made in semantics textbooks: given that extensions are not part of linguistic knowledge, how can their interaction serve as a basis for explaining it? Before the puzzle is resolved by recourse to the set-theoretic nature of intensions, new clarifying observations on extensions...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before April 29. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Transparent Negation: Retroactive specification and zilch Date: April 30th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: Judging from examples like the following, negation seems to be capable of blocking the accessibility of potential antecedents in its scope for anaphoric pronouns in subsequent discourse.   (1) No man walks in the park. *He whistles. (2) Peter doesn't own a car. *It's too expensive. On the other hand, there are several examples that cast some doubt on this assessment, be it the ease with which referential expressions outscope negation or the impact on further negation, just to name a few:   (3) Peter didn't...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jonathan Weinrich  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. If you didn't do so yet, send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before April 22. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Gestural referents as SDRT anaphora Date: April 23rd Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: Lascarides & Stone (2009) outline a semantic approach to interpreting gestures. They integrate the gestures into the SDRT framework of Asher & Lascarides (2003) and allow them to combine by discourse relations. This involves the usage discourse referents in a DRT-like fashion. While they do not explicitly advocate the idea, a possible interpretation of their examples suggests that all gestural discourse referents are restricted in coreference by the same structural constraints as pronouns. As a start of my research into...