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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Felicitas Kleber (Saarland University) in the Phonology Colloquium

by Anna Pressler Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Felicitas Kleber in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday December 3rd Time: 16-18 ct. Title: Acoustic cue reweighting in diachronic sound change Many diachronic sound changes are characterized by minimal changes at the subphonemic level and a slow, gradual progression throughout the speech communities. While generational vocalic changes along one articulatory-acoustic dimension (e.g. back vowel fronting and F2 raising) are well documented in the sociolinguistic literature, the reweighting of multiple subphonemic cues to consonants has only recently become the focus of laboratory phonological studies, e.g. on tonogenesis in Afrikaans and Korean where VOT is giving way to tonal contrasts. This talk focusses on the emergence of VOT as a cue to the voicing contrast in German regional varieties that were hitherto either signalled by closure duration alone or considered neutralized. These changes are very likely the result of dialect levelling, i.e. they come about through contact with standard German where VOT is the primary cue to this contrast. They nevertheless offer insights into...
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