MultiCom funds 11 short-term collaborations

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
The Potential Field Multimodal Communication (MultiCom) is delighted to announce that 11 short-term collaborations have been selected for funding following the recent call. The short-term collaborations are at the heart of MultiCom. They are intended to bring different scholarly perspectives and disciplines into conversation with one another and to open up new interdisciplinary dialogues on multimodality and multimodal communication. We are very pleased by the strong response to the call. The selected projects provide an excellent starting point for developing research on multimodality at Goethe University as a broadly interdisciplinary field. The funded collaborations involve researchers from a wide range of areas, including several subfields of linguistics, neurocognitive psychology, anthropology, theatre studies, media theory and sound studies, photography, media archaeology, and visual culture. The funded short-term collaborations are listed below. Further information on the individual projects will be published on our website soon. The selected projects will present first results at the second MultiCom Workshop, which will take place on 20 November 2026...
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Talks by Prince Asiedu (Frankfurt) and Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
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,...
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Talk by Andy Lücking (Chemnitz) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Andy Lücking (Chemnitz) 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: June 25, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: From Hand to Space: Decoding the Semantics of Iconic Gesture Abstract: Spatial gesture semantics takes seriously the dual nature of iconic gestures: they are both visuo-spatial events and objects of linguistic classification. The former is spelled out in terms of vector spaces, the latter in terms of classifiers. Linguistically classified gestures, in turn, can trigger the inference of implicatures, as is studied in discourse semantics. Hence, spatial gesture semantics draws on a range of standard semantic approaches, including (Davidsonian) event semantics, computational semantics, dynamic semantics, gesture studies, lexical and frame semantics, and -- of course -- vector semantics. This raises both concerns and aspirations for a unified formal account. The talk reviews (with a few improvements) spatial...
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Lennart Fritzsche and Sebastian Walter present at „Measuring Commitments in Communication“

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
The Semantics team was represented with two talks at the workshop Measuring Commitments in Communication (MCC), held at Radboud University Nijmegen. Lennart Fritzsche gave a talk titled “Measuring commitment: A diagnostic comparison using belief–commitment dissociation”. Sebastian Walter, together with Jonas Hartke (Göttingen), gave a talk titled “Measuring commitment in iconic gesture: The role of (not-)at-issueness”. Together, the two talks contributed to the workshop’s broader discussion of experimental approaches to the study of commitment, with a focus on diagnostic methods and the role of commitment in visual communication. The workshop program and book of abstracts can be found here. ...
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Talk by Karen Emmorey (San Diego) in Göttingen (June 17) and Frankfurt (June 18)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Karen Emmorey (San Diego State University). She will present the talk on June 17 in the LinG Colloquium in Göttingen and on June 18 in the Semantics Colloquium in Frankfurt. The talk will be held in English. On Wednesday, interpretation into German Sign Language (DGS) will be provided. Both talks can be attended either in person or via Zoom (see practical information below). Title: Linguistic and neural consequences of iconicity in American Sign Language Abstract: Iconicity (a resemblance between form and meaning) in sign languages appears to be much more pervasive and structured compared to spoken languages. Currently, however, we know very little about how iconicity might impact the structure of the lexicon or whether iconic signs are processed differently in the brain. My colleagues and I have been exploring the nature of the distribution of iconic forms in the American Sign Language (ASL) lexicon, what drives the iconic depiction of semantic features, and whether iconic signs are perceived and...
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