Talk by Caro Reinert (Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Caro Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: What is this teacher skillful at? Accounting for the meaning of skillful-type adjectives Date: November 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I would like to update on two aspects of a chapter of my dissertation. In the first part of the talk, I address the observation that when a skillful-type adjective combines with an individual denoting noun, the noun is able to serve as the basis for the interpretation of the adjective in some cases (e.g. in skillful teacher, which can be paraphrased as skillful as a teacher), and in others it is not able to do so (e.g. in skillful man, which cannot be paraphrased as skillful as a man). I will assume that this difference is due to an event variable being present in the semantics of teacher, but not man (see Rapp 2015, but compare Larson 1998,...
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Two talks by Marie-Joe Kallab (GU Frankfurt) and Melissa Jeckel (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce two talks by Marie-Joe Kallab (GU Frankfurt) and Melissa Jeckel (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 07 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title (Marie-Joe-Kallab): Negation in Lebanese Arabic Abstract: In this talk, I present my Thesis about Negation in Lebanese Arabic. I focus on sentential negation, their syntactic expression, and the interpretation of multiple negation in the Lebanese dialect, based on Zeijlstra’s (2004) research. I demonstrate the three different negative constructions in the language, which are single negation, bipartite negation, and enclitic negation. Furthermore, I argue that Lebanese Arabic is a Strict Negative Concord language as well as a Non-Strict Negative Concord language. There is a difference between positive and negative imperatives regarding person agreement, which suggests the usage of surrogate imperatives. Lebanese Arabic exhibits a diachronic change that argues in favor of Jespersen’s (1917) claim that languages develop regarding negation and how sentential negation is expressed.  I suggest that...
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Talk in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium by Ermenegildo Bidese (U Trient)

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium by Ermenegildo Bidese (U Trient).  The talk will be in German. Title: Auxiliarbewegung im eingebetteten Satz als weitere Stufe zum Abbau der Haupt-/Nebensatzasymmetrie im Zimbrischen Date: Monday, 07.11.2022 Time: 18-20 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 Abstract: Verschiedene Arbeiten über die Syntax des Zimbrischen (vgl. vor allem Bidese & Tomaselli 2018; Tomaselli & Bidese 2019; Bidese, Padovan & Tomaselli 2020) haben gezeigt, dass diese deutsche Varietät in Isolation eine im Vergleich zu den binnendeutschen Dialekten eigentümliche Form von V2 entwickelt hat, in der die Anhebung des finiten Verbs nach C zusammen mit der Möglichkeit koexistiert, DP-Subjekte postverbal zu realisieren (... VP S). Dabei erscheint ein expletives Element, nämlich die Partikel -da/-ta, obligatorisch am Finitum. Die naheliegende Erklärung ist, dass das Auxiliarverb in (4) T0 besetzt; dadurch wird den T-Bereich aktiviert und die Probe-Goal-Verbindung zwischen dem -da und der Subjekt-DP blockiert. Das kann auch als eine weitere Stufe zum Abbau der Asymmetrie zwischen dem...
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Talk by Janne Lorenzen (Köln University)

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Janne Lorenzen (Köln University) Title: Exploring individual variability in prominence production Date: Wednesday, 02.11.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (if necessary, we will stream the talk via Zoom) If you are registered in Olat you'll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: Prosodic prominence is known to be multifaceted, encompassing a variety of cues related to timing, spectral properties and the F0 contour (Baumann & Winter 2018, Roessig et al 2022). It is therefore a reasonable assumption that speakers differ in which of these cues they prioritize in their prominence production. This has been shown to be true, for example, in the case of focus-marking (Cangemi et al. 2015). In this talk, I will present an exploratory analysis of inter-speaker variability in the prosodic encoding of information status in German, looking at several prominence cues...
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Talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Kind- vs. token-level modification Date: November 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: We use language to classify, subclassify, and simply group token entities, and also to attribute properties to the classes, subclasses and groups that we form. In this talk I examine the role of (mainly adjectival) modifiers in these function of language. There is ample evidence that languages distinguish grammatically between the use of modifiers to form a hierarchy of kind and subkind descriptions, to attribute ad-hoc properties to kinds (or subkinds), as well as to form subsets of entities of a given kind. I will survey various sorts of cases, focusing mainly on the elusive category of "relational" adjective, some challenges I have experienced in studying kind- vs. token-level adjectival modification, and some different techniques for exploring the different kinds of modification....
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