Talk by Johannes Mursell (Goethe University Frankfurt)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Johannes Mursell (Goethe University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Title: Evidentials in German Date: April 25 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Room: IG 4.301 Abstract: In this talk, I discuss various properties of elements in German that have been argued to encode evidential meaning, i.e. meaning related to information source, such as the discourse particle wohl and modals sollen/wollen. Starting with the discourse particle wohl, various authors (Modicom, 2012; Göbel, 2018; Eckardt and Beltrama, 2019) argue that it serves as inferential evidential, suggesting that the source of the information expressed is based on reasoning from one’s knowledge. ✓ You’re asked where your keys are. You hear the noise of keys inside your bag. ✗ You’re asked where your keys are. You usually leave them in your bag but you can’t quite remember if you did this time. (1) Sie sind wohl in meiner Tasche.      they are WOHL in my bag     ‘They’re in my bag (I...
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Talk by Jacopo Romoli (Univerity of Düsseldorf)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Jacopo Romoli (Univerity of Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title:Implicating in semi-cooperative contexts (joint work with Paul Marty, Yasutada Sudo, and Richard Breheny) Date: February 17 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In ordinary conversations, disjunctive sentences like June visited Frankfurt or Düsseldorf are commonly understood as conveying that she didn’t visit both cities (exclusivity), and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two cities she visited (ignorance) (Grice 1975, Gazdar 1979, Horn 1972 a.o.). There is general consensus that these inferences are not conveyed as part of the literal meaning, but rather they arise as implicatures. On the standard pragmatic approach, implicatures are the output of implicit reasoning on the part of the hearer over why the speaker said what she said and why not something else (Grice 1975, Horn 1972, Gazdar 1979, Sauerland 2004, Geurts 2010, Chemla 2010, van Rooij &...
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Talk by Max Berthold (GU Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Nominal Aktionsarten Date: February 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Based on a convincing amount of semantic properties shared by verbal tense and the German temporal adjective damalig, I concluded in my last presentation that the adjective is a functional nominal tense. In this talk, I want to address what initially appear to be semantic differences between damalig and verbal tense. First, intuitions may suggest that damalig exhibits semantic restrictions with particular types of nouns such as die damalige Milch (‘the milk at the time‘). Second, German native speakers share the intuition that sentences such as Der damalige Taxifahrer sang die ganze Fahrt ('The taxi driver at the time sang the whole ride) is odd in contexts in which damalig‘s reference time is close to the time of utterance (e.g., yesterday/last week). This behavior would be undesirable if we maintain...
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Talk by Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers University)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers University) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Pointing in spoken and signed languages Date: February 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Pointing is a gesture that occurs early in development and continues to be used with language in both spoken and signed languages. The different distributional and interpretational properties of pointing in the two modalities of language raise the question of whether there is one or many kinds of pointing found across languages and developmental stages. In this talk, I propose a unified analysis of pointing, where it is analyzed as a locational restriction. I argue that the differences observed in the two modalities of language can be derived from assuming a general restriction against cross-modal composition and discuss its implications on the use of pointing and deictic reference....
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Talk by Ewa Trutkowski (Freie Universität Bozen)

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Ewa Trutkowski (Freie Universität Bozen) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. The talk will take place online and will be held in German. Title: Einige experimentelle Befunde an der Genus/Sexus-Schnittstelle (abstract below) Time: February 1st, 2 pm – 4 pm ct Zoom-Link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/j/93325272580?pwd=NlM5a3FrRUwxSUpXa0dVQ1hnU3h5UT09   Abstract: In meinem Vortrag werde ich die Ergebnisse einiger Akzeptabilitätsstudien zum Kongruenzverhalten verschiedener Klassen von Nomen an der Schnittstelle von Genus und Sexus vorstellen. Der Fokus liegt auf Prädikativkonstruktionen. Die Befunde zeigen unter anderem, dass sich maskuline Nomen – auch solche ohne Sexusmerkmale, wie ‚Mensch‘, ‚Gast‘ etc. – in Bezug auf Kongruenz bzw. Kongruenzmismatches anders verhalten als Feminina, was eine syntaktische Unterscheidung der beiden Genera nahelegt und eine Absage an die strikte Kopplung von Genus an Sexus in der Belebtheitsdomäne ist (wie sie z.B. von Kotthoff & Nübling 2018:77 nahegelegt wird). Dies ist auch insofern relevant, als die Interpretation von Genus im Sinne von Sexus (also die Vermengung bzw. Gleichsetzung dieser beiden Merkmale) eine der...
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