Talk by Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt)

We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The compositionality of adjective noun constructions – Investigating the comparison property of skillful-type adjectives Date: June 23 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In the last talk I gave in the colloquium, I addressed the core assumption of my thesis, namely that skillful-type adjectives - apart from being dependent on a comparison class, which makes them similar to tall-type adjectives - are dependent on an additional parameter, a comparison property. Given a value for these parameters, skillful-type adjectives turn out to be complex predicates after all, not modifiers, and therefore are able to combine with the noun via Intersection. I argued for a “context dependence only” approach to adjective denotations. In this talk, I will present the next chapter of my thesis. I will address further issues in connection with the comparison property of skillful-type adjectives and will argue that the comparison property is present as an actual argument to the adjective, not as...
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Talk by Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz ZAS, Berlin)

We are happy to announce the next talk by Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz ZAS, Berlin) in the Phonology Colloquium. Title: Towards a typology of prosody-segment interaction: The case of tone-driven epenthesis Date: Wednesday, 22.06.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: IG 4.301 in person, if necessary with additional Zoom If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: This talk presents on an oft-neglected topic in phonological typology: the interaction between segments and prosody (e.g. pitch/tone/intonation/etc.). Some prosody-segment interactions are commonly found (e.g. tone lowering with depressor consonants) and others are known to be quite rare (e.g. tone height dependent on vowel height), but in general its empirical landscape has not been firmly established. This talk argues that we must add to this typology a novel process we call ‘tone-driven epenthesis’, defined as the phonological insertion of a vowel in order to host a tone (e.g. a high pitch target). We show evidence for tone-driven epenthesis in two African languages Wamey (Tenda, Niger-Congo: Senegal)...
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Two talks by Daniel Aremu (Frankfurt) and Samuel O. Acheampong (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

We are happy to announce two talks by Daniel Aremu (Frankfurt) and Samuel O. Acheampong (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: The syntax of Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Likpakpaanl (Sam Acheampong)             Association with focus in Mabia languages (Daniel Aremu) Date: June 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct...
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Talk by Kevin Tang (HHU Düsseldorf)

We are happy to announce the next talk by Kevin Tang (HHU Düsseldorf) in the Phonology Colloquium. Title: Sentence prosody leaks into the lexicon: evidence from Mandarin Chinese Date: Wednesday, 15.06.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: IG 4.301 in person, if necessary with additional Zoom If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: While the precise extent to which phrasal phonology interacts with word-level phonology is a long-standing issue, it is generally assumed that lexical phonology is at least somewhat independent of phrasal phonology, including intonation. Exemplar theory complicates this division, as phonetically detailed exemplars encode context-dependent prosody in the lexical representation (Pierrehumbert 2016). In line with this prediction, some evidence for the lexical encoding of intonation has been found in German and English, languages in which pitch accents are assigned at the phrasal level (Schweitzer et al. 2015). Schweitzer et al. showed that f0 contours are more stable in predictable collocations than in unpredictable collocations, suggesting a possible lexicalization of intonation. The current study probes this issue in Mandarin...
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Talk by Aremu, Hartmann, Himmelreich, Mursell (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu, Katharina Hartmann, Anke Himmelreich, and Johannes Mursell (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Morphological marking of focus in Mabia Date: June 13 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In Mabia, focus is not marked by intonation but by focus particles and word order. We discuss the ex-situ and in-situ focus strategies in the four Mabia languages Dagbani, Dagaare, Likpakpaanl, and Kusaal. We demonstrate that some, but not all the languages provide morphological evidence for a low focus projection. Further we show that, despite the languages being closely related, the focus strategies differ a lot. We end with some speculations about how the strategies should be analyzed and end with some further questions....
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