Talk by Fenna Bergsma, Monday 13th, 5-6 pm

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, May 13, 5 (sharp) – 6 pm in IG 254. Fenna Bergsma will present „The 2SG pronoun in Frisian“. Abstract: It has been argued (cf. Postma 2013) that the Frisian 2SG pronoun has different forms dependent on its position with respect to the verb. Preverbally, the pronoun do is used. Postverbally, the clitics -o/-e are possible or the pronoun can be dropped. (1) a. Do  sjochst him.           you see       him           'You see him.' b. Sjochst -o/-e/∅ him?     see         you       him     'Do you see him?' This observation is used as a basis to argue that preverbal and postverbal pronouns have different positions in the syntax, and that they spell out different part of the syntactic structure. I will argue that the description in (1) is incorrect, removing the basis to assume different syntactic objects are realized. I show that Frisian has, preverbally and postverbally, do as a full...
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Talk by Caroline Féry, Monday 6th, 4-6 pm

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce a talk in the meeting of the Syntax-semantics colloquium of IEAS, which will take place on Monday, May 6, 4 – 6 pm in IG 3.201. Caroline Féry will present „A puzzle for verum focus“. Abstract: If verum focus is to be analyzed as a Roothian kind of focus, eliciting a set of alternatives and following the regular rules of sentence accent assignment (Höhle 1992, Goodhue 2018), a dialogue like the following one is problematic since the only new element in Sam’s sentence is the negation. Micah: Where is everyone else? Sam: There is noone else However, the negation is not accented, instead the verb is accented (see Richter 1993 for a syntactic account of the unstressed status of the negation). In my talk, I will show that verum focus has a variety of additional interpretations (see Romero & Han 2004, Gutzmann & Castroviejo 2011, Lohnstein 2016, Samko 2017 among others) and I will introduce an additional one: counter-assertive vs....
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Talk by Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum), Thursday 2nd, 4-6 pm

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, May 2, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum) will present „Bayesian Pragmatics and the Contextual Modulation of Word Meanings in Online Comprehension: A Quantitative Model of EEG and Cloze data“. Abstract: We contrast three quantitative models to explain the contextual modulations of word meanings and how they affect the probabilistic predictions on the completion of a discourse. How words are semantically understood by a listener can not only be studied from the point of view of compositionality, i.e., by asking what they contribute to the truth-conditions the listener recognizes the speaker to express when the latter has uttered a sentence. Word meanings can also be studied by looking at their dynamic effects, i.e., asking in which way they influence the listener’s predictions about the truth-conditions the speaker is going to express when completing the sentence. The Semantic Similarity...
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