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...
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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...
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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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