Talks – Seite 24 – Institut für Linguistik

Talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium

31. Oktober 202231. Oktober 2022 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....

Talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf)

24. Oktober 2022 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...

Talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium

18. Oktober 202218. Oktober 2022 by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed

We are happy to announce a talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: On the theoretical and empirical challenges of multiple agreement with subjects and objects Date: October 24 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk will focus on languages in which a finite verb agrees with the subject (S) and object (O), and in which O-agreement is argued to be conducted by a head high in the syntactic structure, such as T/Infl. Of particular interest are the verbal morphological templates in which O-agreement is realised by affixes closer to the verbal stem than S-affixes (Hungarian, Trommer 2003, E Kiss 2019; Tundra Nenets, Nikolaeva 2014; Khanty, Mansi, Mordvin, E Kiss 2019, Quechuan, Myler 2017, Nez Perce Deal 2017). Under Mirror Principle, this indicates that O-agreement applies before S-agreement, which is problematic for the standard Minimalist view of agreement, under which the subject should act as an intervener. The puzzle will...

Talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt)

8. Juli 2022 by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed

We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:The first name/last name asymmetry – Observations and Experimental investigation Date: July 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In my research I adopt the assumption that proper names are no different than common nouns. This assumption bears the name predicativism in the literature on proper names. For predicativists, proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g. ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. I believe that predicativism can provide potential insight into the way in which proper names interact with determiners in some languages, and into the structure of complex proper names and of proper names below the word level. The focus of this presentation will be to present some observations related to complex proper names (i.e., full names) and to propose an experiment to...

Talk by Max Berthold (Frankfurt)

5. Juli 2022 by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed

We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: On Eventive Nouns Date: July 7 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Nominals contribute temporal information to the utterance. This information may or may not be independent from the verbal predication time denoted by the matrix verb with which the nominal appears. Available theories in semantic literature establish the parameters that govern the nominal predication time: the type of determiner, the tense on the verb, or the context. While this covers most of the empirical landscape, there are examples that have been unaccounted for. In this talk, I will advocate for an extension to the existing theories which aims to capture the lexical temporal properties of nouns. I will argue that nouns separate into two classes: eventive and state nouns. Eventive nouns are characterized by having a hidden event argument that can be anaphoric to contextually supplied events. This allows us to explain...