Talk by Ramona Hiller (Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Ramona Hiller (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: A Corpus Study on German Privative Adjectives based on joint work with Carla Spellerberg Date: December 8 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present a corpus-based study of nine counterfactual German adjectives that allegedly behave privatively which was conducted by a fellow student, Carla Spellerberg, and me in 2021. Since Partee’s (2010) influential suggestion that privative adjectives actually behave subsective on the coerced denotation of the noun they combine with, a lot of research has investigated the way these adjectives shift the noun denotation. Our intention with this thorough look at a large number of German adjective-noun combinations featuring alleged privative adjectives is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to learn more about noun shifts that can actually be observed in natural language when privative adjectives are involved and how often subsective and privative uses of the respective adjective occur. This allows us to add more much-needed empirical evidence to...
Read More

Talk by Sascha Alexeyenko (Universität Göttingen) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Sascha Alexeyenko (Universität Göttingen) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 05 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Modelling the direct-inverse system of Mapudungun Abstract: The direct-inverse system of Mapudungun/Mapuche (Araucanian; Chile, Argentina) presents a puzzling pattern of verbal marking in the so-called local scenarios, i.e. scenarios in which the arguments of a transitive clause are 1/2P speech act participants. In particular, the otherwise regular direct-inverse marking pattern breaks down, new markers emerge that do not otherwise appear in the paradigm, and the agreement system becomes sensitive to the cumulative number of the participants involved. The aim of this talk is to show that existing analyses of direct-inverse systems in terms of person licensing, most notably those by Bruening (2001) and Béjar and Rezac (2009), fall short in accounting for Mapudungun data and to offer an alternative account, which incorporates some of their insights, but differently from any...
Read More

Talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The first name/last name asymmetry - Update on the experimental design and a possible semantic analysis Date: December 1 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In my research I adopt the assumption that proper names are no different than common nouns. This assumption bears the name predicativism in the literature on proper names. For predicativists, proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g., ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. I believe that predicativism can provide potential insight into the way in which proper names interact with determiners in some languages, into the structure of proper names below the word level and into the structure of full names. The focus of this presentation will be to discuss my ongoing reflection on the semantics of last names (and, by extension, of full names). First, I will...
Read More

Talk by Leonie Barabas-Weil (Universität Leipzig) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Leonie Barabas-Weil (Universität Leipzig) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 28 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Long distance wh-movement in Turkana Abstract: In this talk, I will present novel wh-movement data from Turkana, an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in the North of Kenya. Turkana has VSO word order which allows focus and wh-element movement to the preverbal domain. In sentences with two CPs with wh-movement from the lower CP, the lower CP may have a copy of the wh-element in the pre- or postverbal position but the copy is not obligatory. However, as soon as the sentence has three CPs, the sentence becomes ungrammatical unless there is at least one copy of the wh-element in the intermediate or the lowest CP in either the pre- or postverbal position. The sentence is also grammatical if each CP has a copy of the wh-element, however, the sentence...
Read More

Roundtable discussion by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt), Carla Umbach (Cologne), and Louise McNally (Barcelona)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a roundtable discussion by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt), Carla Umbach (Cologne), and Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Ways of adjectival modification Date: November 24 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This week we will have a round table discussion on the topic of nominal modification. Participants are Louise McNally, Carla Umbach and me, Cécile Meier. Louise McNally is currently a Mercator Fellow at Frankfurt University and Carla Umbach is a Goethe Teaching professor at Frankfurt University. We are all concerned with the semantics of noun phrases, modification and reference to kinds. Semantic research states that there are different types of kinds. Carlson introduced well-established kinds, Dayal and Krifka discuss regular kinds, atomic kinds and sub-kinds, and taxonomic readings of kind-referring expressions (see also Pelletier’s work).  What is not well-researched is the effect of modification. McNally argues that there are so-called relational adjectives modifying kinds instead of tokens, and Umbach argues that ad-hoc kinds...
Read More