Lennart Fritzsche and Sebastian Walter present at „Measuring Commitments in Communication“

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
The Semantics team was represented with two talks at the workshop Measuring Commitments in Communication (MCC), held at Radboud University Nijmegen. Lennart Fritzsche gave a talk titled “Measuring commitment: A diagnostic comparison using belief–commitment dissociation”. Sebastian Walter, together with Jonas Hartke (Göttingen), gave a talk titled “Measuring commitment in iconic gesture: The role of (not-)at-issueness”. Together, the two talks contributed to the workshop’s broader discussion of experimental approaches to the study of commitment, with a focus on diagnostic methods and the role of commitment in visual communication. The workshop program and book of abstracts can be found here. ...
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Talk by Karen Emmorey (San Diego) in Göttingen (June 17) and Frankfurt (June 18)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Karen Emmorey (San Diego State University). She will present the talk on June 17 in the LinG Colloquium in Göttingen and on June 18 in the Semantics Colloquium in Frankfurt. The talk will be held in English. On Wednesday, interpretation into German Sign Language (DGS) will be provided. Both talks can be attended either in person or via Zoom (see practical information below). Title: Linguistic and neural consequences of iconicity in American Sign Language Abstract: Iconicity (a resemblance between form and meaning) in sign languages appears to be much more pervasive and structured compared to spoken languages. Currently, however, we know very little about how iconicity might impact the structure of the lexicon or whether iconic signs are processed differently in the brain. My colleagues and I have been exploring the nature of the distribution of iconic forms in the American Sign Language (ASL) lexicon, what drives the iconic depiction of semantic features, and whether iconic signs are perceived and...
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Sebastian Walter successfully defends his dissertation

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
On June 8, 2026, Sebastian Walter successfully defended his dissertation titled Interactions of perspective-taking in gesture and speech. We warmly congratulate him on this achievement!  In his dissertation, Sebastian investigates the interactions of perspective-taking in gesture and speech, with a focus on the cross-modal architecture of perspective-taking, the dynamics of multiperspectivity in multimodal language, and the role of perspective in the interpretation of iconic gestures. ...
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Semantics team represented with three contributions at ELM 4

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
The Semantics team was represented with three contributions at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) 4, held at the University of Pennsylvania. Cornelia Ebert, together with Tina Nägele and Britta Stolterfoht, gave a talk titled “Does spoken and gestural manner modification differ in at-issueness?”. Carolin Reinert, together with Carla Spellerberg, presented a poster titled “On dancers and ballerinas: Experimental evidence for a meaning-based perspective on nominal event arguments”. Lennart Fritzsche and Sebastian Walter contributed a short talk (online), titled “Testing the tests: A re-evaluation of at-issueness diagnostics across modalities”. We are very happy to see the Semantics team represented so strongly at ELM 4.  ...
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Talk by Edgar Onea (Graz) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Edgar Onea (Graz) 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: June 11, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: A Static Semantics for Gender and Anaphora Abstract: This talk develops a compositional semantics in which the basic nominal objects manipulated by grammar are not individuals, but loci: formal representational addresses under which individuals are stored. The central motivation comes from grammatical gender. Unlike person or number, grammatical gender does not normally contribute an ordinary individual-level property: a German masculine pronoun, for instance, need not refer to a male individual. Yet gender  constrains cross-sentential anaphora. The question is therefore how a feature can matter for interpretation without being a truth-conditional property of the individual. I propose that grammatical gender is a property of representations rather than of individuals. A locus can represent an individual while also carrying...
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