We are happy to announce a talk by Maximilian Berthold (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts.
Title: The anaphoricity of German temporal adjectives
Date: June 10
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
German offers a rich inventory of temporal adjectives that serve to locate the time at which the property denoted by the noun hold of its referent. This talk investigates the semantic properties of the German adjective damalig (‘at the/that time’) which appears to have an anaphoric meaning component. Such anaphoricity would require any noun phrase modified by damalig to be supplied with a reference time by the context. This raises the questions how these noun phrases are temporally interpreted and how damalig is analyzed in a semantic framework. I provide empirical evidence that the interpretation of damalig-noun phrases is contextually determined which motivates my hypothesis that damalig should be analyzed as a time pronoun. The investigation of an anaphoric temporal adjective has significant implications for nominal tense. It has been claimed that, to date, no nominal expression has been shown to have nominal tense. On the basis of the evidence presented, however, I argue that damalig is a tense in the nominal domain.