We are happy to announce a talk by Prince Asiedu (Frankfurt) and a talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talks 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: July 2, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 7 pm c.t.
Prince Asiedu (Frankfurt)
Title: Multimodal iconicity of ideophones and Co-speech gestures in Akan
Abstract:
Many spoken languages with diverse typological features have ideophones, a special class of words defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). Ideophones share certain morphological and semantic properties (Kita 1997, Dingemanse 2015, Barnes 2024, Ebert and Steinbach 2024). They are an open lexical class. They depict rather than describe. There is an iconic relationship between form and meaning. They are marked expressions with specific grammatical properties, such as reduplication. They lie in the domain of sensory imagery. Ideophones are often accompanied by a conventionalised co-speech gesture. In this presentation, I focus on the last property. I investigate the formal properties of ideophone-accompanying gestures in Akan (a Kwa language spoken in Ghana). I ask how gestures visually depict the meaning of the ideophone, and how the degree of conventionalisation influences the multimodal production of ideophones and co-speech gestures. Generally, I hypothesise that a gesture will depict the meaning of an ideophone, and that highly conventionalised ideophones will be accompanied by more consistent, similar gesture patterns across speakers. 10 Akan native speakers (5 older than 40 years, 5 younger than 40 years) were asked to produce a gesture that accompanies the 12 ideophones they heard, without any contextual information. All items were presented to the speakers on PowerPoint. Participants listened to two audio files: one containing the ideophone and the other containing a question. For the accompanying gestures, I used phonological similarity as a measure of their conventionalisation grade: the more similar the gestures produced by different speakers for the same ideophone, the more conventionalised we considered them. Phonological similarity was measured by comparing the specification of all relevant phonological parameters (handedness, movement, handshape, orientation, location). The evaluation of the data shows that 9 out of 10 ideophones accompanied by a gesture in Akan appear to be similar across speakers, indicating a high degree of conventionalisation. The data shows that the phonological structure of the ideophone aligns with the gesture (reduplicated ideophones have corresponding reduplication of the gesture).
Jan Köpping (Frankfurt)
Title: „The“ universal falsifier
Abstract:
In a recent paper (Hofmann 2025), Lisa Hofmann introduced a „universal falsifier“ into the domain of individuals over which assignment functions range in dynamic semantics to account for the (somewhat surprising) projection behavior of discourse referents that are introduced by indefinite descriptions embedded below negation. Her proposal is in a nutshell, that their falsity conditions make use of this peculiar individual to „use up“ the discourse referent they introduce without being able to assign to it a proper individual as value. This then allows for anaphora in certain cases, even though the antecedent traditionally is conceived to be inaccessible. My talk intends to explore several ways how this idea can be transferred to the semantics of definite descriptions and discusses their consequences.