We are happy to announce a single-authored talk by Sebastian Walter (Frankfurt) and a talk by him and Lennart Fritzsche (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 21, 2024
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Talk 1: Sebastian Walter (Frankfurt)
Title:
Indirect discourse as mixed quotation: Insights from shifted face emoji
(joint work with Stefan Hinterwimmer)
Abstract:
Indirect discourse (ID) has been claimed to prohibit shifted interpretations of face emoji (Grosz et al. 2023). However, in this talk evidence is presented that face emoji can receive a shifted interpretation in ID utterances. Specifically, it will be shown that they can receive an interpretation from the perspective of the matrix subject, thus adding ID to the list of environments where the interpretation of face emoji is not strongly anchored to the author (cf. Grosz et al., 2021). A similar behavior has been attested for certain deictic expressions (Plank, 1986; Anderson, 2019) as well as self-pointing gestures (Ebert & Hinterwimmer, 2022; Walter, 2024). Drawing on a suggestion by Ebert & Hinterwimmer (2022), these findings are interpreted as evidence of mixed quotation being available in ID. Building on an earlier analysis extending Davidson’s (2015) demonstrational account of quotation to ID (Walter, to appear), we claim that ID—roughly speaking—makes two meaning contributions: i) an at-issue contribution that there exists a reported speech event, its content being the same as the proposition embedded under the attitude verb in the ID utterance and ii) a not-at-issue contribution that the demonstration of this speech event made by the ID utterance is similar to the form of a subevent of the reported speech event, thereby enforcing that only parts of the reported speech event are quoted.
Talk 2: Lennart Fritzsche (Frankfurt) & Sebastian Walter (Frankfurt)
Title:
Nodding yes or doch? On the interpretation of gestural response elements
Abstract:
In response to negative antecedents, German ja (‘yes’) and nein (‘no’) can be used interchangeably. Both can be used to affirm negative antecedents, but never to reject them. A rejection of negative antecedents is only felicitous with the specialized particle doch, cf. (1).
(1)
A: Sind meine Schuhe nicht in deinem Kleiderschrank? (‘Are my shoes not in your closet?’)
B: (i) Ja. (= They aren’t.)
(ii) Nein. (= They aren’t.)
(iii) Doch. (= They are.)
It has been standardly assumed that–in cases such as responding to polar questions–, standalone (pro-speech) headnods and headshakes can be used interchangeably with ‘yes’ and ‘no’, respectively (e.g., Kendon, 2002; Fusaro et al., 2012; Lücking and Ginzburg, 2021).
As it stands, however, there is only a vague empirical picture of the distribution of standalone head gestures used as response elements. While it is fairly easy to identify nodding with ‘yes’ and shaking with ‘no’ in positive contexts, the situation is more complex in negative contexts (e.g., Loos and Repp, 2024, for German).
We present data from an experimental forced-choice study investigating the interpretation of headnods and headshakes used as response elements in comparison to German ja and nein. Our findings suggest that while both headnods and headshakes can be used to affirm negative antecedents (just like ja and nein), headnods, by themselves, can also be used to reject negative antecedents, akin to doch. Thus, a more complete picture of German response tokens in negative contexts incorporates the interchangeability of ja, nein and headshake, while headnods are at least to some extent ambiguous.