Autor: Lennart Fritzsche

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 that so many people...

On March 4, 2026, Max Berthold successfully defended his dissertation titled Temporality in the Nominal Domain: Tense and Aspect. We warmly congratulate him on this achievement!    In his dissertation, Max investigates temporal reference of noun phrases in English and German. He argues that verbal temporal reference is supplemented by a structurally parallel system of tense and aspect in the nominal domain, and provides a detailed formal analysis of German temporal adjectives as overt realizations of nominal tense and aspect.  ...

We are happy to announce that the Semantics Department will organize the second Formal Linguistic Approaches to MultiModality (FLAMM) workshop on August 27–28, 2027, in collaboration with the Priority Program Visual Communication (ViCom). The workshop aims to promote and advance the study of multimodality from a formal linguistic perspective by bringing together scholars interested in the formal analysis of visual and multimodal communication. With this event, we follow up on the first successful edition of the conference, which took place at Trinity College in Dublin. Further details will be announced in due course....

Kick-off Workshop – Potential Field Multimodal Communication (MultiCom) May 18, 2026 | 11:00–18:00 | Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg Since January 2026, the Potential Field Multimodal Communication (MultiCom) (speakers: Cornelia Ebert and Frank Kügler) has been established within Goethe University’s Profile Area Universality & Diversity. The initiative aims to develop a cross-disciplinary research focus on multimodal communication at Goethe University and within the Rhine–Main Universities (RMU). The kick-off workshop will bring together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to discuss current perspectives on multimodal communication and future directions for collaboration within MultiCom. The workshop program is now available: Program (PDF) Please note that registration for the workshop is now closed. The workshop will take place in person....