Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (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: The compositionality of adjective noun constructions – The role of context-dependence Date: January 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: There are two major proposals discussed in the literature regarding the question how adjectives are to be analyzed semantically: (i) adjectives are predicates or (ii) adjectives are modifiers (see, e.g., Montague 1970, Kamp 1975). While adjectives like red are analyzed as predicates, adjectives like tall and skillful need a more complex approach and receive a modifier analysis. However, there are alternatives on the market: for gradable adjectives like tall, complex predicate analyses such as the measure function approach (see, e.g., Kennedy 1999, 2005, Kennedy&McNally 2005) have been developed, building on the observation that such adjectives are dependent on a comparison class. As a consequence of the analysis as a complex predicate,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Petra Augurzky (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: Investigating effects of prosody and frequency on the on-line processing of quantified sentences – evidence from ERP studies on revision-sensitivity in German Date: January 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Recent studies have shown that compositional-semantic processing may sometimes proceed in a non-incremental manner. For instance, quantified sentences can exhibit considerable processing delays during on-line sentence comprehension. In my talk, I will introduce a series of ERP studies using picture-sentence verification that investigate such processing delays in sentences involving quantifier restriction in German. Overall, I will argue that the parser’s predictive capacity may sometimes lead to parsing delays associated with the on-line truth value assignment in a sentence. In the second part of the presentation, I will discuss two studies on contextual cues that might be used by the parser for overriding...