Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Muyi Yang (UConn) 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: Iffy if: Japanese moshi in conditionals and related constructions Date: January 21 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Across languages, conditional antecedents can often be marked by elements that signal the speaker's sense of "iffiness" about the antecedent proposition, such as English if (von Fintel and Iatridou 2002), German falls (Hinterwimmer 2014)  and sollte (Sode and Sugawara 2019). This talk concerns Japanese moshi, a marker in conditional antecedents that has been traditionally described as a signal of supposition. I will first investigate the distribution of moshi in various types of conditionals such as factual conditionals and unconditionals, and show that the iffiness expressed by moshi has to do with whether the antecedent proposition is in the common ground. I will propose a presuppositional account of moshi, and further extend the analysis to capture its use...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jeremy Kuhn (CNRS) 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: Boundaries in space and time: Iconic biases across modalities Date: January 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In cognition, spatial and temporal boundaries have been theorized to be central to humans' perception of objects and events. In language, a related semantic property has characterized the mass/count and telic/atelic oppositions, which have been argued to be grounded in these non-linguistic conceptual representations. Intriguingly, boundarihood has also been shown to be involved in a motivated mapping in sign language: telic verbs are associated with gestural boundaries. In a series of experiments, we investigate the origin of this mapping bias. We show that non-signing subjects show an iconic bias to associate bounded forms with bounded meanings, and unbounded forms with unbounded meanings. The representations involved are abstract and domain general: the bias is found both for...