Autor: Lennart Fritzsche

On September 21–22, 2026, the workshop At-issueness and Commitment: Interfaces and Interactions took place at Goethe University Frankfurt. The workshop was organized as part of CRC 1718 Common Ground, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and hosted by Project A4 Multimodality, Iconicity and the Common Ground: The Status of Speech and Gesture.  The workshop brought together researchers from semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, philosophy of language, and related fields to discuss the relationship between at-issueness and commitment. Both notions play a central role in theories of meaning and discourse, but their relationship remains far from settled. Does at-issue content generally come with stronger speaker commitment? Can at-issueness and commitment come apart? Or should one of the notions ultimately be understood in terms of the other? These questions provided a common thread throughout the two days and connected a wide range of theoretical and empirical work.  The program featured invited talks by Anna Kocher (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), Martina Faller (University of Manchester), and Corien Bary (Radboud...

The Semantics team was represented with two posters at the 6th Experimental Pragmatics in Italy (XPrag.it 6), held in Genoa, Italy. Cornelia Ebert and Sebastian Walter, together with Daniel Teich and Stefan Hinterwimmer, presented a poster titled "Event kind vs. event token interpretations of iconic gestures in the VP domain". Sebastian Walter, together with Lyn Tieu, Selina Zheng and Natalia Liu, presented a second poster titled "At-issue and non-at-issue contributions of emoji: Evidence from contrastive inferences". We are very happy to see the Semantics team represented with two contributions at XPrag.it 6. Sebastian Walter presenting the poster “At-issue and non-at-issue contributions of emoji: Evidence from contrastive inferences”. Daniel Teich and Sebastian Walter presenting the poster “Event kind vs. event token interpretations of iconic gestures in the VP domain”. ← See all Semantics News...

Kathryn Barnes was invited to give a talk together with Aleksandra Ćwiek (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) at the workshop From the Sound Up, held at Uppsala University from 16–18 September 2026. Their talk, "The search for ideophones in ideophonically impoverished languages", was part of a session on documenting onomatopoeia, databases, and resources. The workshop brought together researchers working on vocal imitation, onomatopoeia, iconicity, and sound symbolism, with a particular focus on how these phenomena contribute to the emergence and structure of linguistic systems. ← See all Semantics News...

On Saturday, 19 September 2026, the DFG Priority Program ViCom (Visual Communication) will be part of the Frankfurt Science Festival at the Roßmarkt in Frankfurt am Main. From 14:15 to 16:15, visitors can find ViCom at Stand 5 (#experiment) in the Goethe University tent. At two interactive stations, visitors will be able to take part in short experiments and experience research on visual and multimodal communication first-hand. ViCom researchers will introduce the studies, explain the questions behind them, and show how much of human communication goes beyond words alone. The Science Festival is open to everyone and admission is free. More information about ViCom's participation can be found here. Come by and explore visual communication with us! ← See all Semantics News...

The Semantics team was represented with three talks at the 30th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2026 – LuffDial), held at Loughborough University. Lennart Fritzsche gave a talk titled “Intensified response particles and polarity opposition”. Sebastian Walter gave a talk titled “Investigating contrastive inference generation across speech and gesture” and, together with Jonas Hartke, presented a second talk titled “When are speakers committed to their gestures? Insights from deceptive communication”. We are very happy to see the Semantics team represented with three contributions at SemDial 2026. ← See all Semantics News...