Talk by by Vinicius Macuch Silva (Birmingham) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Vinicius Macuch Silva (Birmingham) 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: December 21, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Talking numbers: Exploring the communication of quantity in English Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the communication of quantity. I will start by contextualizing quantity and its expression through language. Following this, I will present three empirical studies focused on quantity communication in English: two experimental psycholinguistic studies and one corpus-based one. The first study deals with multimodal quantifier interpretation (i.e., how the interpretation of several is modulated by gesture), the second one with the production of quantifiers in argumentative scenarios (i.e., how people use quantifiers such as some and most to make quantities appear large or small), and the third one with the usage of change-of-state verbs (e.g. expressions such as “rising prices”...
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Talk by Viktor Köhlich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Viktor Köhlich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 18, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "te-no clauses in Japanese” Abstract: In this talk, I look at a type of noun-modifying clause in Japanese that has not received much attention in the literature. Although verbs can DP-internally never co-occur with the element -no, which is otherwise obligatory with most other word classes, they do when the suffix -te is attached beforehand, normally used for coordination of clauses among others. An example is (1). (1) [masuku-wo tsuke-te-no] jugyō mask-ACC put.on-TE-NO class `a class in which you wear your mask' Compared to ordinary relative clauses, this type of clauses is subject to more restrictions. The modified noun for instance cannot be an argument of the modifying clause and needs to depict an event. After presenting all relevant facts about this construction, I will attempt at a tentative analysis. Specifically, I will propose that these clauses are instances of TPs...
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Talk by Fenna Bergsma (Fryske Akademy) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Fenna Bergsma (Fryske Akademy) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. Date: Tuesday, December 19, 2023 Room: IG 2.301 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: "At least three infinitives in Frisian" Abstract: Frisian has two morphologically distinct infinitives: one ending in -e (pronounced as [ə]) and one ending in -en (pronounced as [n]). It has been argued (cf. Visser 1989, Hoekstra 1997, Bergstra 2020) that they follow the noun-verb distinction and that infinitives on -e are verbal infinitives and infinitives on -en are nominal infinitives. In some cases, the forms neatly fit their contexts: the verbal suffix -e appears in a verbal context and the nominal suffix -en appears in a nominal context. However, this is not always the case: there are infinitives on -en that appear in a verbal context and not in a nominal one (which has also been signaled by Hoekstra 1997). This means that a description with two infinitives does not fully capture the...
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Talk by Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Saarbrücken) in the Phonology Colloqium

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Bernd Möbius in the Phonology Colloqium on Wednesday, 13.12.2023, 16-18 ct. in IG 4.301. Title: Information Density and Phonetic Variation. Abstract: In this talk I will take an information-theoretic perspective on speech production and perception. I will explore the relation between information density and phonetic encoding and decoding. Information density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the unit's negative log probability in a given context). The main hypothesis underlying our experimental and modeling work is that speakers modulate details of the phonetic encoding in the service of maintaining a balance of the complementary relation between information density and phonetic encoding. To test this hypothesis we analyzed the effects of surprisal on phonetic encoding, in particular on dynamic vowel formant trajectories, stop consonant voicing, syllable duration, and vowel space size, while controlling for several basic factors related to the prosodic structure, viz. lexical stress and major prosodic boundaries, in the statistical...
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