The Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 30 are out!

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are delighted to announce that the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 30, which took place in Frankfurt in September 2025, have now been published! The volume, featuring the wonderful contributions presented at SuB30, is available here. We are very happy to see the proceedings out—just in time for Sinn und Bedeutung 31 in Nantes! We are very grateful to everyone who contributed to SuB30 and to bringing this volume together....
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Carolin Reinert at SALT 36 in Buenos Aires

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
From July 29-31, 2026, Carolin Reinert attended the 36th Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) conference at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she presented a joint poster with her co-author Carla Spellerberg (University of Massachusetts Amherst). The poster, entitled "Telling World Knowledge and Linguistic Knowledge Apart: Experimental Evidence for a Meaning-Based Perspective on Nominal Event Arguments", presented new experimental evidence on how lexical meaning and world knowledge interact in the interpretation of adjective-noun combinations. Combining theoretical semantics with psycholinguistic experimentation, the project investigates which nouns encode typical activities as part of their linguistic meaning. The results of a maze experiment support a meaning-based account according to which both deverbal and certain non-deverbal nouns are associated with event arguments, contributing to our understanding of how linguistic knowledge differs from general conceptual knowledge. The conference offered an inspiring environment for scientific exchange, with talks and poster sessions covering a wide range of topics in formal semantics. Presenting the poster sparked engaging discussions with...
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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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