Talks

We are happy to announce two talks by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) and Kathryn Barnes (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Date: July 6, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Julien Foglietti Title: What’s in a last name? Semantics and experimental update Abstract: In this talk I will present further support to my proposal that last names used referentially carry a family membership presupposition. In the first section, I will walk us through the presupposition tests (Karttunen, 1973) applied to the use of referential last names. I will also introduce a new experimental design – inspired by Tonhauser (2012) – which will bring experimental support to my proposal.  In the second section of the talk, I will present the results of my previous experiments. These results show that; indeed, the notion of family membership is linked with how we use last names in referential expressions. Furthermore, these results will also open the question of how the content of the presupposition that...

We are happy to announce two talks by Sebastian Walter (Wuppertal) and Cécile Meier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Date: June 22, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Sebastian Walter Title: Are there salience differences between character and observer viewpoint gestures? Abstract: The present study investigates salience differences between character viewpoint gestures (CVGs) and observer viewpoint gestures (OVGs). Since co-speech gestures usually contribute not-at-issue meaning by default (cf. Ebert et al., 2020) and are thus backgrounded, it was hypothesized that there is no salience difference between CVGs and OVGs. A forced-choice study was conducted to investigate this hypothesis. The results show that there is no significant difference between CVGs and OVGs. Although further research is needed to fully clarify this matter, it is tentatively concluded that there is no difference in salience between the two gesture types. Therefore, the results of previous studies that found an overall preference for CVGs compared to OVGs (Hinterwimmer et al., 2021)...