Max Berthold successfully defends his dissertation

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
Max Berthold successfully defends his dissertation   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.  ...
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FLAMM 2027: Second Workshop on Formal Linguistic Approaches to Multimodality

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
FLAMM 2027: Second Workshop on Formal Linguistic Approaches to Multimodality 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....
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Kick-off Workshop – Potential Field “Multimodal Communication” (MultiCom)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
Kick-off Workshop – Potential Field Multimodal Communication (MultiCom) May 18, 2026 | 11:00–18:30 | 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). MultiCom brings together scholars from linguistics and philology, literary and cultural studies, theatre, film and media studies, art history and visual culture, fine arts, history, psychology and cognitive neuroscience, musicology and ethnomusicology, as well as computational and digital humanities research. To launch the initiative, we invite colleagues to a kick-off workshop that will introduce its scope and aims and connect perspectives from the participating disciplines. The workshop will be structured around short impulses and open contributions, providing space to share current projects, research questions, and ideas for collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. A central aim of the day is to...
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Talk by Maria Aloni (Amsterdam) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Maria Aloni (Amsterdam) 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: February 12, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Nothing is Logical  Abstract: People often reason in ways that deviate from classical logic. An influential idea introduced by Grice is that these deviations are not logical mistakes but rather consequences of pragmatic enrichments derived as the product of rational interactions between cooperative language users. Challenging the Gricean tradition, the core hypothesis behind this research is that many of the enriched interpretations we observe in everyday conversation are not derived by Gricean reasoning, but rather result from biases due to our [human] preference to minimise cognitive effort. I will present two such biases that on our hypothesis affect both reasoning and interpretation: (i) a tendency to avoid emptiness (neglect-zero); and (ii) a negative bias towards the...
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Talk by Christopher Saure (Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Christopher Saure (Wuppertal) 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: February 5, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: The multiperspectival potential of indirect discourse  Abstract:  There is an overall consensus in the literature on perspectivization in language that indirect discourse (ID) does fundamentally not allow perspective shift of deictic expressions in its scope, which are thus obligatorily interpreted from the speaker’s context (e.g., Schlenker 2004). Consequently, research on perspective shift has been primarily focused on free indirect discourse (FID) for its seemingly unique display of multiperspectivity.  In this talk, I provide theoretical and empirical evidence that this prevalent view of ID does not accurately capture its true perspectival potential. Specifically, I argue that ID allows for the same indexicals to shift to the perspective of the reported utterance’s or thought’s original author as FID, namely spatio-temporal...
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