Talk in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium by Ermenegildo Bidese (U Trient)

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium by Ermenegildo Bidese (U Trient).  The talk will be in German. Title: Auxiliarbewegung im eingebetteten Satz als weitere Stufe zum Abbau der Haupt-/Nebensatzasymmetrie im Zimbrischen Date: Monday, 07.11.2022 Time: 18-20 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 Abstract: Verschiedene Arbeiten über die Syntax des Zimbrischen (vgl. vor allem Bidese & Tomaselli 2018; Tomaselli & Bidese 2019; Bidese, Padovan & Tomaselli 2020) haben gezeigt, dass diese deutsche Varietät in Isolation eine im Vergleich zu den binnendeutschen Dialekten eigentümliche Form von V2 entwickelt hat, in der die Anhebung des finiten Verbs nach C zusammen mit der Möglichkeit koexistiert, DP-Subjekte postverbal zu realisieren (... VP S). Dabei erscheint ein expletives Element, nämlich die Partikel -da/-ta, obligatorisch am Finitum. Die naheliegende Erklärung ist, dass das Auxiliarverb in (4) T0 besetzt; dadurch wird den T-Bereich aktiviert und die Probe-Goal-Verbindung zwischen dem -da und der Subjekt-DP blockiert. Das kann auch als eine weitere Stufe zum Abbau der Asymmetrie zwischen dem...
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Talk by Janne Lorenzen (Köln University)

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Janne Lorenzen (Köln University) Title: Exploring individual variability in prominence production Date: Wednesday, 02.11.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (if necessary, we will stream the talk via Zoom) If you are registered in Olat you'll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: Prosodic prominence is known to be multifaceted, encompassing a variety of cues related to timing, spectral properties and the F0 contour (Baumann & Winter 2018, Roessig et al 2022). It is therefore a reasonable assumption that speakers differ in which of these cues they prioritize in their prominence production. This has been shown to be true, for example, in the case of focus-marking (Cangemi et al. 2015). In this talk, I will present an exploratory analysis of inter-speaker variability in the prosodic encoding of information status in German, looking at several prominence cues...
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Talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Kind- vs. token-level modification Date: November 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: We use language to classify, subclassify, and simply group token entities, and also to attribute properties to the classes, subclasses and groups that we form. In this talk I examine the role of (mainly adjectival) modifiers in these function of language. There is ample evidence that languages distinguish grammatically between the use of modifiers to form a hierarchy of kind and subkind descriptions, to attribute ad-hoc properties to kinds (or subkinds), as well as to form subsets of entities of a given kind. I will survey various sorts of cases, focusing mainly on the elusive category of "relational" adjective, some challenges I have experienced in studying kind- vs. token-level adjectival modification, and some different techniques for exploring the different kinds of modification....
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Talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take online over Zoom. Please enroll in the OLAT course of the syntax colloquium to get the link or write to Katharina Hartmann. Titles: More is going on upstairs than downstairs: There is a penthouse in Kuce Date: October 31 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, we investigate polar interrogatives in Kuce (Kuche) or Ce (Che), a minority Plateau (Benue-Congo) language spoken in north-central Nigeria. The language employs a clause-final vowel lengthening strategy in polar questions (1-2). We, therefore, argue that: (a) the vowel quality of the question marker is determined by the final vowel of the clause; (b) the polar interrogative marking follows a strict-finality constraint; (c) the phenomenon is a main clause phenomena and (d) it is unavailable in focus construction. We show that unlike many lax prosodic languages with a single/uniform vowel, polar question marking....
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Talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Interpretation and placement of English -ly adverbials: a case for a new quantitative approach Date: October 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The interplay of position and interpretation of adverbials has received considerable attention over the last 20 years. But even for English, there is no clear consensus on which readings need to be distinguished, which orderings of adverbials are grammatical, and whether, in the case of -ly adverbials, the semantic analysis should be based on the semantics of the base form or not. The aim of my talk is to discuss the ways quantitative measures like collocations and distributional semantics can be leveraged to clarify this picture. After an overview of the problems, I will discuss three case studies illustrating three different approaches. The first case study shows that collocations of the base adjectives in attributive position annotated for the ontological category of the head allow a more finegrained look at the consistency of...
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