Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Dolf Rami (University of Bochum) 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: A unified semantics for bare names and demonstratives Date: January 13 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that we not only have to distinguish bare from complex demonstratives, but also bare from complex proper names. In both cases, the semantics of the bare and the complex versions are significantly different, but nevertheless related. In this paper, I will mainly focus on a semantics for bare names and demonstrative. I will show that there are good reasons to consider them as close semantic relatives and I will propose a new use-sensitive formal semantics to account for their semantic relation, following and updating my investigations in this direction in Rami (2022)....

We are happy to announce a talk by Carla Umbach (University of Cologne) and Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) 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: Demonstratives of Manner, Quality and Degree – constraints on features of comparison  Date: December 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Demonstratives of manner, quality and degree occur across languages, e.g. Turkish böyle, Polish tak and German so (König & Umbach 2018). In (1) German so is used to express a quality modifying a car:  (1) (speaker points at a car):  Anna hat auch so ein Auto.  'Anna has a car like this, too.'  From the point of view of semantics, demonstratives of manner, quality and degree pose the problem of how to reconcile their demonstrative characteristics with their modifying capacity. Umbach & Gust (2014) suggest that these demonstratives are directly referential but express similarity (instead of identity) to the target of the demonstration gesture. Similarity is spelled out...

We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Weskott (University of Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium where he will present joint work with Johanna Klages, Elsi Kaiser, and Anke Holler. 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: Testing Perspectivization Effects Online: The Case of Counteridenticals Date: December 9 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Taking on another person's perspective is a fundamental part of human cognition. Linguistic expressions play an important role in perspectivization: they can signal a shift in perspective, and their interpretation can be sensitive to different perspectives (see Bylinina et al., 2015). Although there is quite a lot of literature on the semantics and pragmatics of perspective shifting and perspective sensitivity, experimental investigations of the comprehension processes involved is relatively sparse, especially with respect to online measures. In this talk, we present a visual word eye-tracking experiment in which participants were presented with linguistic stimuli that contained counteridenticals, i.e. counterfactuals of the form...