Talks

We are very happy to announce the first talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, April 25, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Ora Matushansky (Paris/Utrecht) will present „Doing without“. Abstract: Caritive PPs (without X) are characterized by their ability to appear without an article in Romance and Germanic, raising the question of the semantic type of their complement, which is likely to be kind-denoting. In addition, caritive PPs systematically introduce the presupposition that the absent entity should have been present at some level of reality. Whereas the latter fact can be handled by assuming that the complement of without is relational, this hypothesis runs into problems given the kind-denotation hypothesized to deal with the lack of the article. I will discuss a way of resolving this conflict and the theories advanced to deal with similar issues.   You are cordially invited!...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium, which will take place on Wednesday, April 17, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Universität Potsdam) will present „Prosody for speech processing: Determinants of variability and stability“. Abstract: Prosody provides important cues for speech segmentation and lexical access, and it is a well-established finding that listeners make use of prosodic information during speech processing (Cutler, Dahan, & Donselaar, 1997). However, prosody in the speech signal is variable: First, it is subject to cross-linguistic variation. Moreover, it is acoustically highly variable, both within and between speakers. This raises the question of how listeners deal with this variability in language acquisition and speech perception. Are there determinants of stability in prosody perception? In this talk, I will present a series of prosody perception experiments we have carried out with different populations (infants and adults, mono- and bilinguals, with or without (a risk for) developmental dyslexia) to explore these questions. Results...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, April 16, 4 – 6 pm in SH 0.104. Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts) will present "How abstract are real Mental Representations? Searching for the right formulation of recursion in language and Math if they emerge together on the developmental path.". Abstract: Recent work in Minimalism (Chomsky (2013)) has proposed definitions of recursion that are abstract: word order is captured by Externalization, and self-embedding by Indirect Recursion of abstract categories. These formulations can also capture both recursive adjective formation and the recursive indirect embedding of the 1-9 system among multipliers of ten, hundred and thousand. Several new experiments in English and Chinese provide Initial evidence that there are empirical correlations in children between 4-7 years between these stages and the emergence of recursion in possessives and Adjective phrases up to four levels (big little big little boxes). You are cordially invited!...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantics Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, February 14, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Jan Köpping (Goethe University) will present "What it takes to be unique". Abstract: Definite descriptions can be used in a multitude of ways: they can be used deictically and anaphorically, and they have de re as well as de dicto interpretations, etc. Some properties go hand in hand with several but not all of these uses, especially the infamous 'uniqueness condition' that seems to be present in 'presuppositional' but absent in anaphoric uses of the definite article. In this talk, I want to show what it needs to transform Irene Heim's File Change Semantics -- a system designed to account for anaphoric uses -- into a framework that captures definite descriptions in such a way that uniqueness-effects only arise when they should without postulating an ambiguity of the definite article. You are all cordially invited....

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium, which will take place on Wednesday, February 13, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Prof. Firmin Ahoua (University Félix Houphouët-Boigny) will present “ACO, The Secret language of the Cama people”. Abstract: Aco is a secret language spoken by the Ébrié (camancan) of Côte d’Ivoire that has never been documented, described or discovered by previous scholars who worked on the language and culture. This language is shared only by a closed circle of initiated speakers. The language is strongly ritualized and sacred and is performed with particular rhythms and songs during specific events. It is claimed to be used for incantations of protection against physical or spiritual enemies, songs for entertainment and also in traditional narratives. The initiated speakers are able to communicate on daily needs in this language as any regular native language. According to oral tradition, this language is assumed to have been created by a family in...