Talk by Morgan Moyer (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Morgan Moyer (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/62660316332?pwd=94KnkxFireEQFCWBGpi35ZwrClwoLa.1  Date: October 22, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Meaning Beyond Truth: A Psychosemantic Approach to Affective Meaning Abstract: How are different kinds of linguistic meaning represented and accessed in cognition? Research in semantics and pragmatics distinguishes truth-conditional content from presuppositions, conventional implicatures, and other kinds of non-at-issue meaning. Experimental pragmatics and psycholinguistics, meanwhile, investigates how linguistic information becomes available during comprehension, how pragmatic inferences unfold over time, and how semantic features organize conceptual representations. Yet the relationship between these linguistic distinctions and the cognitive status of the content they characterize remains poorly understood. This talk brings together two strands of experimental research to investigate this relationship. The first examines the cognitive prominence of affective valence relative to truth-conditional conceptual features. Using speeded categorization and similarity judgments, I investigate whether affective information is especially accessible and...
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Lennart Fritzsche and Sebastian Walter present at Linguistic Evidence 2026 in Mannheim

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
The Semantics team was represented with a talk and a poster at Linguistic Evidence 2026, held at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim on October 15–16, 2026. Sebastian Walter gave a talk titled "Can depictive meaning generate alternatives? Evidence from co-speech and pro-speech gestures". Lennart Fritzsche presented a poster titled "Commitment modifiers in German polar questions". We are very happy to see the Semantics team represented with two contributions at Linguistic Evidence 2026. ← See all Semantics News...
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Workshop “At-issueness and Commitment: Interfaces and Interactions” held at Goethe University Frankfurt

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
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...
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Cornelia Ebert and Sebastian Walter present at the 6th Experimental Pragmatics in Italy (XPrag.it)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
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...
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Kathryn Barnes gives an invited talk at “From the Sound Up” in Uppsala

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
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...
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