Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Elin McCready (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: January 16, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Norms of Language Use and Perspective Abstract: In this talk I argue that the perspectives agents hold — their ideologies, beliefs, and identities — can be extracted from their linguistic behavior. Specifically, because social meanings relate to speaker values and social beliefs, their language use tends to reflect these values. Taking such meanings and treating them in terms of self-ascription, together with norms of speech relating to how particular pieces of language are properly used, yields a `public perspective’ in partial correspondence to the notion of agential identity proposed in the recent philosophical literature....

We are happy to announce another talk by Janek Guerrini (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: December 19, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Similatives as inherent generics Abstract: In this paper, I give an account of constructions expressing similarity such as like John and like a lawyer. The main point of the paper is that in like a lawyer, the indefinite receives a generic interpretation, which explains why under its most available reading, John looks like a lawyer is equivalent to John looks like a typical lawyer. However, this indefinite is generic in a surprising way. Generic quantification is standardly thought to be brought about by a silent quantificational adverb, Gen, bearing a meaning akin to generally (see e.g. Krifka et al. 1995). It is therefore expected, on the standard picture, that an indefinite that can receive generic interpretations should...