The Linguistic Owl-Stars at the Goethe Run

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
On 26 August 2026, seven members of the Institute of Linguistics took part in this year’s Goethe Run as the Linguistic Owl-Stars. The 5.8-kilometer after-work run brought together members of the Rhine-Main Universities and connected Goethe University’s Ginnheim and Westend campuses. Many thanks to Tristan Nagel for organizing our team—and congratulations to all our runners!...
Read More

The Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 30 are out!

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are delighted to announce that the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 30, which took place in Frankfurt in September 2025, have now been published! The volume, featuring the wonderful contributions presented at SuB30, is available here. We are very happy to see the proceedings out—just in time for Sinn und Bedeutung 31 in Nantes! We are very grateful to everyone who contributed to SuB30 and to bringing this volume together....
Read More

Carolin Reinert at SALT 36 in Buenos Aires

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
From July 29-31, 2026, Carolin Reinert attended the 36th Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) conference at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she presented a joint poster with her co-author Carla Spellerberg (University of Massachusetts Amherst). The poster, entitled "Telling World Knowledge and Linguistic Knowledge Apart: Experimental Evidence for a Meaning-Based Perspective on Nominal Event Arguments", presented new experimental evidence on how lexical meaning and world knowledge interact in the interpretation of adjective-noun combinations. Combining theoretical semantics with psycholinguistic experimentation, the project investigates which nouns encode typical activities as part of their linguistic meaning. The results of a maze experiment support a meaning-based account according to which both deverbal and certain non-deverbal nouns are associated with event arguments, contributing to our understanding of how linguistic knowledge differs from general conceptual knowledge. The conference offered an inspiring environment for scientific exchange, with talks and poster sessions covering a wide range of topics in formal semantics. Presenting the poster sparked engaging discussions with...
Read More

Talk by Pascal Hohmann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Pascal Hohmann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Date: July 16, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Before what happens? NPIs and expletive negation in German bevor-clauses Abstract: German 'bevor' ('before') clauses are an unusual environment in which two superficially opposite, negation-related phenomena surface in one and the same syntactic frame. On the one hand, 'bevor'-clauses license negative polarity items (NPIs) — such as 'mit der Wimper zucken' 'bat an eyelid', '(einen) Mucks machen' 'make a peep', 'ein Wort sagen' 'say a word', or 'je' 'ever'. On the other hand, they host expletive negation (EN): a 'nicht' that, in the right context, does not reverse the truth conditions of the clause it appears in (Krifka 2010): (1) Ich gehe nicht nach Hause, bevor das (nicht) fertig ist. 'I won't go home before that is (not) finished.' — both variants truth-conditionally equivalent The talk pursues a semantic question: are...
Read More

Talk by Chiara Marchetiello (Dublin) in a joint session of the Semantics and Syntax Colloquia

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a joint session of the Semantics and Syntax Colloquia, featuring a talk by Chiara Marchetiello (Dublin). The talk will take place on campus in IG 411. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: July 9, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: To be or not to be integrated: A formal account on [PDO] in Campania Abstract: In this talk, I discuss some initial observations on the syntactic integration of gesture found in the rich gestural inventories of the local languages spoken in Campania region (Italy). Specifically, I present two case studies on the gesture called [PALM-DOWN-OPEN-HAND-PRONE] ([PDO]). Based on new data collected from primary fieldwork I conducted in Campania, I show that [PDO] can be syntactically integrated into the grammar of the languages of Campania in two different ways. When [PDO] accompanies speech, it can be interpreted as an epistemic marker which indicates the speaker's certainty towards the truth-value conditions of...
Read More