Talk by Janek Guerrini (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Janek Guerrini (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: October 24, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Color adjectives: insights from Italian Abstract: When post-nominal, Italian adjectives have the range of readings that is familiar from English: ‘red pen’ may denote a red-inked pen, or a pen with a red outer surface. When pre-nominal, instead, Italian color adjectives can only target the visible part of objects denoted by the noun they modify – ‘penna rossa’ (‘red pen’, pre-nominal) can only denote a pen with a red outer surface. In this work, I argue that this systematic grammatical behavior is hard to account on most extant accounts of color adjective composition. I present a compositional analysis in the spirit of Szabó (2001), capturing both the context-sensitivity and the systematicity of color adjectives. In my approach, color adjectives...
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Talk by Vadim Dyachkov (LLACAN / CNRS, Paris) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Vadim Dyachkov (LLACAN / CNRS, Paris) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: October 21, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Decomposing middle voice in Natioro” Abstract: My talk deals with the properties of middle voice in Natioro, an underdescribed Gur language spoken in Burkina Faso. In Natioro, middle voice forms (whose exponent is the lengthened vowel of the perfective stem) exhibit properties similar to those of passive constructions. Depending on the lexical class of a verb, Natioro middle forms also can have anticausative, detransitive, but not reflexive and reciprocal, meanings. However, the agent can never be expressed overtly, and there is no construction corresponding to English by-phrases. Nevertheless, standard tests applied to detect the presence of the agent (agent control, licensing of instrumental adjuncts, possibility to passivize causatives) show that it is indeed present in the semantic structure. In my talk, I discuss the results of these...
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*CANCELLED* Talk by Paul Koenig (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
*CANCELLED* We are happy to announce a talk by Paul Koenig (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: October 24, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Scale theory in adjective semantics Abstract: Gradable adjectives cause difficulties in the analysis of their semantic and logical form due to different phenomena such as references to comparative classes, dimensional references, units of measurement, factor phrases and norm references. How the constants of the semantic form relevant for graduation are represented in the logical form, taking into account the factors mentioned, is part of the work of Bierwisch (1987), on which the approaches in this paper are based. The main objective is to use a new definition of directed intervals to specify the definitions given in Bierwisch 1987, which are intended to provide a mathematical/logical framework for the representation of the logical form, and to close problems that...
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Talk by Thomas Strobel (Università Ca’ Foscari) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Strobel (Università Ca’ Foscari) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. Date: Thursday, July 11, 2024 Room: IG 251 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: "Exzeptiva – Grenzfälle zwischen Präpositionen und Konjunktionen?" Abstract: Während die Semantik von Exzeptiva wie engl. except (for) oder but bereits gut erforscht ist, gibt es zu deren Syntax noch recht wenig Literatur (so etwa zu dt. außer ausführlicher nur Döring & Jay 2017). Im Vortrag konzentriere ich mich auf das Vorkommen von Exzeptivmarkern zusammen mit Nominalphrasen als Ausnahmen. Dabei fällt auf, dass die Kasuswahl nach dt. außer sowie seinen niederländischen und schwedischen Entsprechungen nl. behalve / schwed. (för)utom (hier bei nachfolgenden Pronomina) schwankt. Im Deutschen gilt außer als „(syntaktischer) Einzelgänger“ (grammis bzw. Pasch et al. 2003). Auch nl. behalve wird beispielsweise in der Syntax of Dutch den „Borderline cases“ (Broekhuis 2013: 1.4) zugerechnet und schwed. (för)utom befindet sich laut SAG an der Grenze bzw. ist ein „Mittelding“ (mellanting) zwischen Präposition und Konjunktion (1999:...
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