Kategorie: SemNews

Approaches to NPIs and their Licensing Conditions: Anything New? (Working group at DGfS 2026) Organized by Carolin Reinert & Farbod Khouzani (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, CRC NegLaB) On 26 and 27 February 2026, the workshop Approaches to NPIs and their Licensing Conditions: Anything New? took place as part of the 48th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2026). The workshop brought together researchers working on negative polarity items (NPIs) from theoretical, experimental, corpus-based, and cross-linguistic perspectives, with the goal of reassessing classic questions about NPI licensing in light of recent developments. We kicked off the workshop with a stimulating Warming Up Dinner on the evening of 25 February, which gave us the occasion to get to know each other and start exchanging our ideas on NPIs. Invited Talks We had the pleasure and honor to welcome two wonderful invited speakers to our workshop. Our first invited speaker Manfred Sailer (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) presented corpus-based work on The NPI that licensed itself, offering fine-grained corpus profiles that...

Birthday workshop for Cornelia Ebert  On 3 March 2026, we celebrated Cornelia Ebert’s 50th birthday with a workshop at Goethe University. Colleagues and friends joined from Frankfurt and from a number of other universities in Germany and abroad, including Berlin, Potsdam, Tübingen, Göttingen, Bochum, Konstanz, Budapest, and Toruń. The workshop opened with welcoming remarks by Kathryn Barnes, Lennart Fritzsche, and Sebastian Walter. Presentations were given by Thomas Ede Zimmermann, Manfred Krifka, Markus Steinbach, Daniel Gutzmann & Katharina Turgay, Britta Stolterfoht, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Aleksandra Ćwiek & Susanne Fuchs, Stefan Hinterwimmer, and Nadine Bade. The talks spanned a range of topics connected to Cornelia’s research in formal semantics and pragmatics, including expressive meaning, presupposition and implicature, lexical ambiguity, gesture and multimodality, and the role of context in interpretation. Alongside the academic program, the afternoon also included musical contributions and plenty of lively conversations. The celebration continued in the evening at a traditional Frankfurt Apfelwein restaurant. It was a wonderful day, and we were very happy...

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.  ...

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....

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...