We are happy to announce a talk by Kurt Erbach (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Title: (Non-)Existence entailments of predicates (joined work with Dolf Rami)
Date: October 26, 2023
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
Object mass nouns like “furniture” and “equipment” are a focal point of countability research because they refer to intuitively countable objects but grammatically pattern with nouns that don’t: “mud”, “concrete”, etc. One of the primary ways in which theories of countabiltiy differ is in their treatment of object denotation (as opposed to substance denotation) and how this interacts with other semantic operations. Despite all of these assumptions, little experimental work has been done on the conditions under which object mass nouns are acquired. This talk presents several experiments designed to test how it is that object mass nouns are acquired.