Kategorie: SemNews

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....

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...

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...

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. ...

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. ...