Kategorie: SemNews

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. ...

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.  ...

On May 18, 2026, the new Potential Field Multimodal Communication (MultiCom) held its kick-off workshop at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. The workshop brought together a broad range of disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, theater studies, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, as well as graphic illustration. The goal of the workshop was not only to introduce the Potential Field itself, but also to bring together researchers across Goethe University and the RMU network whose work engages with related questions around multimodality, but for whom there has so far been relatively little structured exchange across disciplinary boundaries. A large part of the workshop was dedicated to discussion and exchange. Following a first round of introductions and icebreakers, eleven participants gave short contributions connected to their own research or interests related to multimodality. Some participants already work directly on multimodal communication, while others approached the topic more from the perspective of possible future connections to their own fields. The workshop program can be downloaded...

Yuqiu Chen has joined the Semantics team in April 2026 as a postdoctoral researcher in the central project of the DFG priority program “Visual Communication” (ViCom). In addition to teaching classes in semantics and pragmatics, she also serves as the experimental consultant for the ViCom priority program. Yuqiu's research lies in theoretical and experimental linguistics, and focuses on the semantics–pragmatics interface, in particular implicatures and presuppositions, as well as first and second language acquisition of German. More recently, she has also worked on lying and commitment distinctions in speech-accompanying gestures. We are very happy to welcome her to Frankfurt and to the Semantics team....