Talk by Fenna Bergsma, Monday 13th, 5-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, May 13, 5 (sharp) – 6 pm in IG 254. Fenna Bergsma will present „The 2SG pronoun in Frisian“. Abstract: It has been argued (cf. Postma 2013) that the Frisian 2SG pronoun has different forms dependent on its position with respect to the verb. Preverbally, the pronoun do is used. Postverbally, the clitics -o/-e are possible or the pronoun can be dropped. (1) a. Do  sjochst him.           you see        him           'You see him.' b. Sjochst -o/-e/∅ him?     see         you        him     'Do you see him?' This observation is used as a basis to argue that preverbal and postverbal pronouns have different positions in the syntax, and that they spell out different part of the syntactic structure. I will argue that the description in (1) is incorrect, removing the basis to assume different syntactic objects are realized. I show that Frisian has, preverbally and postverbally, do as a full...
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Talk by Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum), Thursday 2nd, 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, May 2, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum) will present „Bayesian Pragmatics and the Contextual Modulation of Word Meanings in Online Comprehension: A Quantitative Model of EEG and Cloze data“. Abstract: We contrast three quantitative models to explain the contextual modulations of word meanings and how they affect the probabilistic predictions on the completion of a discourse. How words are semantically understood by a listener can not only be studied from the point of view of compositionality, i.e., by asking what they contribute to the truth-conditions the listener recognizes the speaker to express when the latter has uttered a sentence. Word meanings can also be studied by looking at their dynamic effects, i.e., asking in which way they influence the listener's predictions about the truth-conditions the speaker is going to express when completing the sentence. The Semantic Similarity...
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Talk by Ora Matushansky, Thursday 25th, 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the first talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, April 25, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Ora Matushansky (Paris/Utrecht) will present „Doing without“. Abstract: Caritive PPs (without X) are characterized by their ability to appear without an article in Romance and Germanic, raising the question of the semantic type of their complement, which is likely to be kind-denoting. In addition, caritive PPs systematically introduce the presupposition that the absent entity should have been present at some level of reality. Whereas the latter fact can be handled by assuming that the complement of without is relational, this hypothesis runs into problems given the kind-denotation hypothesized to deal with the lack of the article. I will discuss a way of resolving this conflict and the theories advanced to deal with similar issues.   You are cordially invited!...
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