Talks by Narjes Eskandarnia and Kim Tien Nguyen (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce talks by Narjes Eskandarnia and Kim Tien Nguyen (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 30, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Narjes Eskandarnia Title: Ideophones and Reduplication in Persian: An Exploration of the Dingemanse Hierarchy and Linguistic Creativity Abstract: The Present thesis explores the properties of Persian ideophones, explicitly focusing on their reduplication patterns and adherence to the Dingemanse Hierarchy. The study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of reduplication in creating ideophones and to investigate the extent to which Persian ideophones align with the hierarchical framework proposed by Dingemanse. The methodology employed in this research is a corpus linguistics approach. Accordingly, a corpus of approximately 300 ideophones and reduplicated words were collected from diverse sources, ensuring a comprehensive representation across different contexts. A table was created to categorize the ideophones, along with translations,...
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Talk by Kathleen Jepson (LMU München): Encoding focus within noun phrases in a free word order language

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Kathleen Jepson (LMU München) on Wednesday, 29.11.2023, from 16-18 in IG 4.301. Abstract: Prosody often encodes focus and givenness at the utterance level. Within noun phrases (NPs), languages use phonological prosodic means such as accenting focused and new information, and deaccenting given information, as well as phonetic prosodic cues such as relative pitch height and alignment, and variation in intensity. Some languages, however, do not mark focus within NPs prosodically, or may have a number of other mechanisms to do the task such as syntactic movement or morphological markers. This talk is concerned with how focus and givenness are realised within NPs in Djambarrpuyŋu, an Australian Indigenous language. Like many Australian languages, Djambarrpuyŋu allows free word order at the utterance-level and within NPs, and additionally permits discontinuous nominal constituents in which the noun and modifiers occur distributed throughout the clause. In other Australian languages, the variability...
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Talk by Gerd Carling (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Gerd Carling (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room  NG 2.701 Date: November 27, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Perspectives on phylogenetic methods of syntax reconstruction: do they solve problems or create new ones?” Abstract: Perspectives on phylogenetic methods of syntax reconstruction: do they solve problems or create new ones? Syntactic reconstruction has a long history in linguistic literature. Beginning with models based on the comparative method, developed by Neogrammarians in the late 19 th century, syntactic reconstruction continued to follow the development of different theoretical approaches of the 20th century. An important model of reconstruction emerged from the typological approach in the mid 20 th century, and more recent models have been using, e.g., construction grammar as a basis for reconstruction. The use of phylogenetic modelling is the most recent approach in this area. Here, the uncertainty of the status of syntactic features at earlier language states is computed...
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Talk by Wim Pouw (Nijmegen) in the Semantics Colloquium

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Wim Pouw (Nijmegen) 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 <fritzsche@em.uni-frankfurt.de> for the link.  Title: Gestural Darwinism Date: November 23, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: While it is clear what constitutes a success for picking up a cup to take a sip, some if not all non-conventionalized gestures "fail" to have (precise) conditions under which the function can be said to be realized.  If it is transparent what function is realized by the gesture, it is generally unclear why this gesture over others was used to realize the function. This issue is at the heart of gesture studies and makes it such that any gesture can be debated concerning its determinate meaning to a point the debate risks being meaningless. The issue is of course real - How do humans organize into a kinematic sequence, s, that realizes...
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Talk by Nelli Kerezova (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Nelli Kerezova (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 20, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Indefinite null objects in European Portuguese” Abstract: Indefinite null objects in European Portuguese The work of Keller and Lapata (1998) is fundamental for the discussion of indefinite null objects. They argue that languages like Greek permit object omission when the omitted objects take a referent with a kind interpretation and are not anaphorically linked to it. Their framework introduces a rule for such languages: an object pronoun must be overt when introducing an object-anaphor but can be omitted when introducing a kind-anaphor. Furthermore, it predicts that certain languages may exhibit the reverse pattern to Greek, where the object pronoun is overt when introducing a kind-anaphor and can be omitted when introducing an object-anaphor. Brazilian Portuguese aligns with this pattern, providing empirical support for Keller and Lapata's theory. However, European Portuguese...
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