Talk by Marieke Einfeldt (University of Konstanz)

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Marieke Einfeldt (Konstanz) in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: November 06, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Differences of prenuclear accents and stops in the two varieties of Zurich German speakers: A within speaker comparison” Abstract: While research on the two languages of bilingual speakers has already received a lot of attention (see e.g., Chang, 2021 for an overview), research on the two varieties of bilectal speakers is still scarce (Kupisch et al., 2023). I will present findings from the analyses of two closely related Swiss German varieties (Zurich German and Swiss Standard German) spoken by the same speakers and compare them to a Standard German control group. We focused on segmental (VOT and closure duration) and prosodic (prenuclear accents) properties that have the potential to differ in the dialectal and in the standard realizations: Zurich German stops have been reported to differ based on closure duration, while Standard German stops are differentiated based on VOT (Ladd &...
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Talk by Rebecca Jarvis (Berkeley/Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Rebecca Jarvis (Berkeley/Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room SH 2.102 Date: November 04, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Three paths to resumption in Atchan” Abstract: In this talk, I document a three-way split in resumption morphology in Atchan (Kwa, Côte d’Ivoire). I show that the morphology of resumptive elements depends both on the kind of A’-dependency involved and the identity of the peripheral element: topics are resumed differently than other elements, and in some positions and dependencies pronouns are resumed differently than lexical DPs. The dependency type split, I argue, is best analyzed by assuming that topics are base-generated in the clausal periphery, while other dependencies involve movement (as is cross-linguistically familiar; cf. Cinque 1977, Aissen 1992, Georgi & Amaechi 2022). Meanwhile, the split between pronouns and lexical DPs emerges in movement-derived dependencies. I argue that the particularities of this second split favor a view on which two...
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Talk by Magnus Poppe (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Magnus Poppe (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: October 31, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Dynamic Binding and Pronoun Dis-agreement Across Modalities Abstract: In multimodal discourse, pointing gestures introduce referents that enhance pronoun resolution, even when grammatical agreement between pronoun and gesture-introduced referents is absent. This study examines the role of "pointing" versus "non-pointing" gestures in pronoun binding by manipulating gesture type and pronoun agreement. Results indicate that pointing gestures facilitate pronoun resolution across both agreeing and non-agreeing contexts, while non-pointing gestures lack this referential impact. Supported by Gutzmann’s (2020) insights, which suggest that gender features on pronouns add a supplementary layer of meaning rather than being central to the main discourse, the findings indicate that gestures may allow pronouns to bind even with a gender mismatch, without altering the truth of the primary...
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Talk by Janek Guerrini (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a 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: October 24, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Color adjectives: insights from Italian Abstract: When post-nominal, Italian adjectives have the range of readings that is familiar from English: ‘red pen’ may denote a red-inked pen, or a pen with a red outer surface. When pre-nominal, instead, Italian color adjectives can only target the visible part of objects denoted by the noun they modify – ‘penna rossa’ (‘red pen’, pre-nominal) can only denote a pen with a red outer surface. In this work, I argue that this systematic grammatical behavior is hard to account on most extant accounts of color adjective composition. I present a compositional analysis in the spirit of Szabó (2001), capturing both the context-sensitivity and the systematicity of color adjectives. In my approach, color adjectives...
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Talk by Vadim Dyachkov (LLACAN / CNRS, Paris) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Vadim Dyachkov (LLACAN / CNRS, Paris) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: October 21, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Decomposing middle voice in Natioro” Abstract: My talk deals with the properties of middle voice in Natioro, an underdescribed Gur language spoken in Burkina Faso. In Natioro, middle voice forms (whose exponent is the lengthened vowel of the perfective stem) exhibit properties similar to those of passive constructions. Depending on the lexical class of a verb, Natioro middle forms also can have anticausative, detransitive, but not reflexive and reciprocal, meanings. However, the agent can never be expressed overtly, and there is no construction corresponding to English by-phrases. Nevertheless, standard tests applied to detect the presence of the agent (agent control, licensing of instrumental adjuncts, possibility to passivize causatives) show that it is indeed present in the semantic structure. In my talk, I discuss the results of these...
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