Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Todor Koev (University of Konstanz) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: "Believe" as Gradable, Strong, and Subjective Date: July 1 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The verb "believe" is standardly analyzed as a universal quantifier over possibilities, i.e. as stating that the prejacent is true across all the attitude holder’s doxastic alternatives (Hintikka 1969). This semantics (i) fails to capture the fact that "believe" is a gradable predicate (cf. "partially believe", "fully believe", etc.) and (ii) does not predict the intuition that "believe" implies some sort of weakness on the part of the attitude holder towards the prejacent proposition (cf. "I believe Kim is on vacation" vs. "I know Kim is on vacation"). In order to remedy the gradability problem, I propose a gradable semantics for "believe" within the framework developed for gradable adjectives (Cresswell 1976; Kennedy & McNally 2005; a.m.o.). As for the modal strength problem, I claim that "believe" has the...

We are happy to announce a talk by Alexander Wimmer (University of Tübingen) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Minimal sufficiency as implicature cancellation Date: June 17 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In his 2012 dissertation, Patrick Grosz assumes two kinds of ONLY, an exclusive and a non-exclusive one, which he also refers to as minimal sufficiency ONLY, henceforth MS-ONLY. German NUR ‘only’ in conditional antecedents is noted by him to be ambiguous between MS- and exclusive ONLY. One factor that clearly disambiguates in favor of MS-ONLY is the insertion of certain particles in the consequent. Consider the following example:  (1)        Heinrich ist (schon / selbst / auch) froh, wenn nur DREI Katzen kommen.             Henry is (already / even / also) glad if only THREE cats come The particles SCHON, SELBST and AUCH, henceforth referred to as EVEN-particles, enforce a reading on which Henry is also happy if more than three cats are around. Such particles are...

We are happy to announce a talk by Maximilian Berthold (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: The anaphoricity of German temporal adjectives Date: June 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: German offers a rich inventory of temporal adjectives that serve to locate the time at which the property denoted by the noun hold of its referent. This talk investigates the semantic properties of the German adjective damalig (‘at the/that time’) which appears to have an anaphoric meaning component. Such anaphoricity would require any noun phrase modified by damalig to be supplied with a reference time by the context. This raises the questions how these noun phrases are temporally interpreted and how damalig is analyzed in a semantic framework. I provide empirical evidence that the interpretation of damalig-noun phrases is contextually determined which motivates my hypothesis that damalig should be analyzed as a time pronoun. The investigation of an anaphoric...

We are happy to announce a talk by Bartosz Więckowski (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Counterfactual implication and counterfactual possibility Date: June 10 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Abstract: Counterfactual inference is usually studied in terms of proof systems defined on the basis of a model-theoretic semantics (e.g., similarity semantics). Typically, the systems extend classical logic. In this talk, I shall (continue to) motivate and outline an intuitionistic proof-theoretic approach that aims to explain the logic and semantics of counterfactuals directly in terms of suitably defined rules of inference.  I will first present elementary intuitionistic subatomic natural deduction systems which make use of various modes of making assumptions. The systems admit a formulation of a proof-theoretic semantics for elementary would-counterfactuals that is based on normalization. I will then extend these systems with possibility operators which are sensitive to assumption-modes, and consider, how, in the intuitionistic setting (no...