Kategorie: SemNews

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....

On June 20, 2026, Cornelia Ebert will give a talk at the Science Talk "Wissen(schaft) häppchenweise" organized by the Kathinka Platzhoff Stiftung. Her talk, held in German, is titled "Semantics and Pragmatics – When Language Gets Hands: How Words and Gestures Create Meaning Together" (original title: "Semantik und Pragmatik – Wenn Sprache Hände bekommt: Wie Worte & Gesten gemeinsam Bedeutung erschaffen"). The event series combines science, conversation, cabaret, and live music in an open and accessible format. Further information about the event can be found on the website of the Kathinka Platzhoff Stiftung (in German)....

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...

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 that so many people...