Talk by Yuqiu Chen (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Yuqiu Chen (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: May 7, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Do we discover that nonnative speakers are more tolerant of at-issueness violations? Abstract: Presuppositions are traditionally considered projective inferences triggered by specific expressions and taken for granted in discourse. However, research has shown that they are not homogeneous with respect to their projection behavior, giving rise to different classification schemes, among them the distinction between semantically projective hard triggers and pragmatically projective soft triggers (Abusch 2002, 2010). More recent work highlights the role of at-issueness and its relation to projection (Simons et al. 2010, Tonhauser et al. 2018), with Aravind & Hackl (2017) proposing that presuppositions cannot directly target the QUD. At the same time, findings on scalar implicatures suggest that L2 speakers may be more...
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Talk by Yichi (Raven) Zhang (Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Yichi (Raven) Zhang (Düsseldorf) 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: April 30, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Retraction and Quasi-Retraction Abstract: Download abstract here...
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Talk by Cornelia Ebert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (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: April 23, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Describing vs. depicting: two ways to convey meaning Abstract: In my talk, I will argue that meaning can be conveyed via two fundamentally different methods: (1) descriptively by the use of arbitrary conventionalized signs and (2) depictively by showing or demonstrating certain referents or events and thereby introducing a communicative act that asks the communication partner to extract conceptual or propositional information from this act, e.g. via ad-hoc analogy building. Formal linguistics and semantics in particular have originally only taken care of descriptive and conventionalized expressions and although recently the interplay of linguistic items and depictive components has been investigated, so far the question of what it actually means to interpret a depictive iconic gesture in...
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Approaches to NPIs and their Licensing Conditions: Anything New?

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
Approaches to NPIs and their Licensing Conditions: Anything New? (Working group at DGfS 2026) Organized by Carolin Reinert & Farbod Khouzani (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, CRC NegLaB) On 26 and 27 February 2026, the workshop Approaches to NPIs and their Licensing Conditions: Anything New? took place as part of the 48th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2026). The workshop brought together researchers working on negative polarity items (NPIs) from theoretical, experimental, corpus-based, and cross-linguistic perspectives, with the goal of reassessing classic questions about NPI licensing in light of recent developments. We kicked off the workshop with a stimulating Warming Up Dinner on the evening of 25 February, which gave us the occasion to get to know each other and start exchanging our ideas on NPIs. Invited Talks We had the pleasure and honor to welcome two wonderful invited speakers to our workshop. Our first invited speaker Manfred Sailer (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) presented corpus-based work on The NPI that licensed itself, offering fine-grained corpus profiles that...
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Birthday workshop for Cornelia Ebert

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
Birthday workshop for Cornelia Ebert  On 3 March 2026, we celebrated Cornelia Ebert’s 50th birthday with a workshop at Goethe University. Colleagues and friends joined from Frankfurt and from a number of other universities in Germany and abroad, including Berlin, Potsdam, Tübingen, Göttingen, Bochum, Konstanz, Budapest, and Toruń. The workshop opened with welcoming remarks by Kathryn Barnes, Lennart Fritzsche, and Sebastian Walter. Presentations were given by Thomas Ede Zimmermann, Manfred Krifka, Markus Steinbach, Daniel Gutzmann & Katharina Turgay, Britta Stolterfoht, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Aleksandra Ćwiek & Susanne Fuchs, Stefan Hinterwimmer, and Nadine Bade. The talks spanned a range of topics connected to Cornelia’s research in formal semantics and pragmatics, including expressive meaning, presupposition and implicature, lexical ambiguity, gesture and multimodality, and the role of context in interpretation. Alongside the academic program, the afternoon also included musical contributions and plenty of lively conversations. The celebration continued in the evening at a traditional Frankfurt Apfelwein restaurant. It was a wonderful day, and we were very happy...
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