Kategorie: SemNews

Chloé Tahar has joined the Semantics team in November 2026 as a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Negative adjectives in language change” (PIs: Cécile Meier and Helmut Weiß) of the CRC 1629 NegLaB: Negation in Language and Beyond. Before coming to Frankfurt, she was a Junior Fellow at the CRC "Prominence in Language" in Cologne and, before that, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel. Chloe's work lies at the intersection of formal semantics and diachronic linguistics. Her research focuses on expletive negation, the topic of her PhD at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and in particular on how its production is constrained by the linguistic environments in which it occurs, such as attitude verbs and adverbial connectives. More broadly, she is interested in the semantics and pragmatics of negation. We are very happy to welcome her to Frankfurt and to the Semantics team....

The Semantics team was represented with a talk and a poster at Linguistic Evidence 2026, held at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim on October 15–16, 2026. Sebastian Walter gave a talk titled "Can depictive meaning generate alternatives? Evidence from co-speech and pro-speech gestures". Lennart Fritzsche presented a poster titled "Commitment modifiers in German polar questions". We are very happy to see the Semantics team represented with two contributions at Linguistic Evidence 2026. ← See all Semantics News...

On September 21–22, 2026, the workshop At-issueness and Commitment: Interfaces and Interactions took place at Goethe University Frankfurt. The workshop was organized as part of CRC 1718 Common Ground, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and hosted by Project A4 Multimodality, Iconicity and the Common Ground: The Status of Speech and Gesture.  The workshop brought together researchers from semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, philosophy of language, and related fields to discuss the relationship between at-issueness and commitment. Both notions play a central role in theories of meaning and discourse, but their relationship remains far from settled. Does at-issue content generally come with stronger speaker commitment? Can at-issueness and commitment come apart? Or should one of the notions ultimately be understood in terms of the other? These questions provided a common thread throughout the two days and connected a wide range of theoretical and empirical work.  The program featured invited talks by Anna Kocher (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), Martina Faller (University of Manchester), and Corien Bary (Radboud...

The Semantics team was represented with two posters at the 6th Experimental Pragmatics in Italy (XPrag.it 6), held in Genoa, Italy. Cornelia Ebert and Sebastian Walter, together with Daniel Teich and Stefan Hinterwimmer, presented a poster titled "Event kind vs. event token interpretations of iconic gestures in the VP domain". Sebastian Walter, together with Lyn Tieu, Selina Zheng and Natalia Liu, presented a second poster titled "At-issue and non-at-issue contributions of emoji: Evidence from contrastive inferences". We are very happy to see the Semantics team represented with two contributions at XPrag.it 6. Sebastian Walter presenting the poster “At-issue and non-at-issue contributions of emoji: Evidence from contrastive inferences”. Daniel Teich and Sebastian Walter presenting the poster “Event kind vs. event token interpretations of iconic gestures in the VP domain”. ← See all Semantics News...

Kathryn Barnes was invited to give a talk together with Aleksandra Ćwiek (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) at the workshop From the Sound Up, held at Uppsala University from 16–18 September 2026. Their talk, "The search for ideophones in ideophonically impoverished languages", was part of a session on documenting onomatopoeia, databases, and resources. The workshop brought together researchers working on vocal imitation, onomatopoeia, iconicity, and sound symbolism, with a particular focus on how these phenomena contribute to the emergence and structure of linguistic systems. ← See all Semantics News...