Talk by Christoph Bracks (GU, Southeast Asia Studies)

by Anna Pressler Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Christoph Bracks in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday January 14th Time: 16-18 ct. Title: Phonetics, Segmental and Suprasegmental Phonology of Totol Abstract: This talk presents key aspects of the phonetics, phonology, and prosody of Totoli, an Austronesian language, based on a forthcoming Illustration of the IPA paper to appear in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA). As a novelty within the Illustration of the IPA genre, the paper places particular emphasis on prosody. Totoli exhibits several typologically unusual features for the region, including phonemic length contrasts in both vowels and consonants, as well as distinct allophonic realizations of /l/. These include, among other features, compensatory lengthening when in word-final position, which may give rise to potential triple-length contrasts. Furthermore, the prosodic systems of Austronesian languages remain comparatively understudied. Hence, the prosodic features observed in Totoli may offer a useful point of departure for further comparative research toward a more comprehensive understanding...
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Talk by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: December 18, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Adjectival Horn Scales Conzeptualized  Abstract:  Pairs of adjectives forming a Horn Scale like <smart, brilliant> are empirically quite well investigated with respect to whether they trigger scalar implicatures or not. The inference of a scalar implicature to the negation of the extreme adjective is rare and more readily derived if the extreme adjective is mentioned in the context (Doran et al. 2009). That mentioning is the not the only factor that governed the derivation of the implicature is until now under discussion. More recently, Hu et al. (2022) argued by investigating Language Models like GPT2 that the expectedness of the stronger alternative captures scalar implicature rates regardless whether the more informative alternative is mentioned in the context or...
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A talk by Ralf Plate (Frankfurt) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium

by Nelli Kerezova Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Ralf Plate (Frankfurt) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Date: December 18, 2025 Time: 2pm - 4pm c.t. Place:  IG 2.201 Title:  "Nutzungsmöglichkeiten der Wortfamilien-Datenbank 'Wortfamilien diachron' (WoDia) am Beispiel der althochdeutschen Adjektive mit dem Präfix un-" Abstract:  Im DFG-Langfristprojekt 'Wortfamilien diachron' (WoDia) wird eine Wortfamilien-Datenbank zum älteren Hoch- und Niederdeutsch (Althochdeutsch, Mittelhochdeutsch, Altsächsisch, Mittelniederdeutsch) erarbeitet. Grundlage sind die Wortschätze der Referenzwörterbücher der vier Varietäten. Sie werden wortbildungsmorphologisch analysiert und nach ihrer Stammverwandtschaft in Wortfamilien geordnet. Das Ergebnis der Analyse wird für jedes Wort in einer hierarchisierten Strukturformel festgehalten, die seinen Wortbildungspfad beschreibt. – Im ersten Teil des Referats sollen das Projekt und seine halbautomatischen Analyseverfahren genauer vorgestellt werden. Der zweite Teil demonstriert die Recherchemöglichkeiten in der Datenbank exemplarisch an den mit dem Präfix un- abgeleiteten althochdeutschen Adjektiven und ihren verschiedenen Bildungstypen, wie sich sich an den Strukturformeln ablesen lassen. Informationen zum Projekt: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/153903162...
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Talk by Lisa Hofmann (Stuttgart) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Lisa Hofmann (Stuttgart) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: December 11, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Negativity without negation: Counterfactual propositions and at-issueness Abstract:  This work addresses the question of what are the levels of representations involved in representing the discourse-effect of negation, by investigating the anaphoric polarity-sensitivity of negativity-tags. Anaphoric negativity­-tags (neg-­tags) occur naturally after negative clausal antecedents, but not affirmative ones (1). These include: (2a) English neither­-tags, (2b) ‘not even’ tags (Klima 1964), and (2c) factive uses of elliptical ‘why not’ interrogatives (Hofmann 2022; Anand et al. 2021). (1) I think that the defense lawyer’s closing statement {didn’t make / # made} an impact in this case. (2) a. Yeah, and neither did the testimonies.      b. Yeah, not even on the public perception.      c. Yeah, and the jury foreperson explained why...
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