Talk by Frank Sode – Thursday 6th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (Goethe Universität). Please find an abstract below. Title: The syntax and semantics of suppletive "wenn"-clauses: Evidence from V2 Room: IG 4.301 Date: February 6th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: As Williams (1974) observed, the sentence in (1-a) can have a reading that can be paraphrased as in (1-b). (1) a. I would be happy if Bill were here.      b. I would be happy that Bill was here, if he were. Pesetsky (1991) argues that Williams' paraphrase is "more than a mere paraphrase". According to Pesetsky (1991), something like (1-b) is an actual syntactic representation of (1-a) at some level of the derivation. It is well-known that V2-clauses in German can alternate with suppletive "wenn"-clauses in construction with preference predicates, see for example Frank (1998), Meinunger (2004), Meinunger (2007). (2) a. Es ist besser, wenn du kommst.           It is better if you come       b. Es ist besser, du kommst.           It is better you come       Both: 'It is...
Read More

Talk by Roland Hinterhölzl – Thursday 30th 4-6pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Roland Hinterhölzl  (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: A situation-based approach to (pro)nominal reference Room: IG 4.301 Date: January 30th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: I will argue that nominal expressions relate an individual and a situation. In particular, I will discuss the interpretation of weak, strong and anaphoric or referential DPs and argue that the interpretation of their situation argument crucially depends on the presuppositions imposed by their determiner, with the default being (in the absence of a presupposition) that the situation argument is identified with the event denoted by the verb. ...
Read More

Talk by Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen), Thursday 16th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the first talk of this decade by Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect Room: IG 4.301 Date: January 16th Time: 4pm - 6pm Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) The study I will present investigates the interaction of tense, aspect and syntactic position of temporal adverbials in the interpretation of sentences that are ambiguous with regard to their temporal interpretation. Sentences with specific time-frame adverbials in German and English (e.g., in three hours”; see example in (1)) are ambiguous between a durative reading, given in (1a), in which the event takes place in the time interval specified by the adverbial, and an inceptive reading, given in (1b), in which the event will start after this time interval. A series of experiments on German showed that the syntactic position of a temporal adverbial as well as verbal tense influences sentence...
Read More