Talk by Viktor Köhlich (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Viktor Köhlich (Goethe University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Merging Position and Size of Indirect Modifiers in Japanese Date: May 30 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk takes a look at the questions what the size ob indirect modifiers in Japanese is, or rather what size it can be, and where they merge in the DP. Adopting a cartographic understanding of the DP (Cinque 2010. 2020), in principle adjectives are expected to merge as reduced relative clauses of size IP in a dedicated functional projection and verbal modifiers to merge in a functional projection for finite relative clauses. Japanese is an interesting case, as the size of the modifier, which is often argued to correlate with finiteness, cannot be readily determined. Modifiers in attributive position only exhibit one surface form and are in their morphological mark-up (mostly) identical to their counterparts in predicative position. While it...
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Talk by Frank Sode (GU Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: A Neo-Heimian semantics for desire reports Date: May 19 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk I defend a Heimian semantics for desire reports. The basic idea in Heim (1992) is that conditionals play an essential role in the truth conditions of desire reports. I argue that if we take the idea of "hidden conditionals" quite literal and assume that conditionals not only play a role in the truth conditions but at the syntax-semantics interface in the object language (= Neo-Heimian), we have a key to a unified solution to two old and two new puzzles relating to conditional morphology in desire reports. First, it helps to explain the puzzling X-marking patterns we find in desire reports (cf. von Fintel & Iatridou (2017,2020)). Second, it gives us a plausible semantics for complement fulfilling conditionals (Williams (1974), Pesetsky (1991)). Third, it makes suprising...
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Talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The Limits of Umlaut in Sinhala: Matching domains across the syntax, morphology, and phonology (joint work with Paula Fenger, Leipzig University) Date: May 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk we study the patterns of verbal umlaut in the Indo-Aryan language Sinhala (spoken in Sri Lanka), which seems to be constrained by an intricate combination of (i) lexical, (ii) morphosyntactic, and (iii) phonological factors. We study this phenomenon and show that it can be used as a window into the morphological makeup of complex words. In particular, we defend  the following claims: 1. Contrary to some claims in the literature (see e.g. Garland 2005), we argue that the limits of umlaut show that Sinhala verb morphology is, underlyingly, concatenative and in order to describe where umlaut appears and where it doesn’t, we need to refer to the notion of the morpheme. 2....
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Talk by Sebastian Walter (GU Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Walter (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The at-issue status of character viewpoint gestures: An experimental investigation Date: May 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Gestures can encode perspective, meaning that they can depict an event from different viewpoints (McNeill, 1992). More specifically, researchers have distinguished between character and observer viewpoint gestures (CVGs and OVGs, respectively). While CVGs depict events from a selected person’s point of view that participated in the event, OVGs depict events as if observed from a distance. Moreover, CVGs usually involve the whole body. OVGs, by contrast, are normally only produced with the hands. In most formal semantic frameworks that model the semantic contribution of speech-accompanying gestures, it is claimed that they contribute not-at-issue meaning by default, i.e., they project and cannot be denied directly in discourse (Ebert & Ebert, 2014; Schlenker, 2018). This claim has been verified in an experimental study reported in...
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