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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Talk by Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Ede Zimmermann (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: November 27, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Intensional type logic: standard translation and non-standard interpretation Abstract:  The compositional interpretation of natural language is often carried out indirectly, by translation into a suitable type logic. This talk concerns the formal properties of such languages. More specifically, it is about Montague’s intensional type logic (IL), which has long been known to be almost expressively equivalent with its two-sorted substratum (Ty2): Gallin’s standard translation from IL to Ty2 can be reversed so as to cover nearly all of the latter, excepting only terms that are themselves of non-intensional types or contain such parameters. However, the proof depended on the so-called standard interpretation of both languages, according to which abstraction and quantification range over full set-theoretic domains. The...
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Talk by Agata Renans (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Agata Renans (Bochum) 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: November 20, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Bare singular and plural kinds: Kind formation across languages Abstract:  Languages with a singular-plural and mass-count distinction as well as overt definite and indefinite determiners are predicted not to allow bare singular kinds (Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004). Ga (Kwa) is such a language (Campbell 2017; Renans 2016a,b, 2018, 2021) and yet both bare singular and plural count nouns can obtain a kind reading: while bare plural form is preferred for entities that are frequently encountered by the Ga speakers, bare singular form is preferred for rarely encountered entities. Moreover, definite NPs can never obtain the kind reading. Thus the Ga data point to a new mechanism of kind formation and to a previously unattested variation in kind...
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Talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (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: November 13, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Non-normally modified descriptions and (non-)existence entailing predicates (joint work with Dolf Rami) Abstract:  Existence entailments are a recurring topic in philosophy of language. According to a widespread view, they arise due to the truthful use of the so-called "existential quantifier" (going back to W.V.O. Quine's slogan "to be is to be the value of a bound variable"). This talk presents our alternative to this view that focuses on the position variables occupy in the logical form of sentences. It argues that the presence of (non-)existence entailments depends on the type of argument position that the (more correctly:) "particular quantifier" binds  into. After a brief sketch of the general architecture of the theory, we present linguistic evidence in favor...
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