Talk by Johannes Mursell, Monday 16th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next last talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 16, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Johannes Mursell will talk about „Association with focus in German“. Abstract: In this talk, I discuss association with focus in German, i.e. examples like (1), mostly with respect to possible adjunction sites of the focus sensitive particle nur ‘only’. (1) Peter hat nur MARIA ein Geschenk gegeben. I will argue that the strong claim of Büring and Hartmann (2001) (B&H), building on early work from Jacobs (1983), can be maintained, namely that in German, nur can only be adjoined to extended verbal projections (VP/vP, TP, CP). I will pay particular attention to two problematic cases from the literature. Starting with extraposed CPs (Reis, 2005), the behavior of which forced B&H to weaken their proposal significantly, followed by a discussion of reconstruction data (Smeets and Wagner, 2018), I will show that B&H’s approach can easily account for the data when combined with some...
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Phonology Colloquium: Nele Ots (Goethe Universität)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the phonology colloquium by Nele Ots (Goethe Universität): Title: Conceptual and linguistic influences on sentence intonation: evidence from English and Estonian languages Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wed 11.12.19 Time: 16-18 Abstract: Phonetic corpus studies have found that phrase-initial F0 peaks correlate with duration of intonation phrases, indicating that speakers are able to anticipate the length of their utterances already before the speech onset. The current view on sentence planning is that while conceptual and syntactic planning processes can be broad, comprising larger parts of upcoming sentences, phonological encoding needs to evolve word by word - incrementally. In relation to sentence production, the phonetic observation of F0 raises a question: at which stage are the global parameters of sentence intonation decided in speakers' minds? The aim of the study was to empirically verify the causal relationship between the F0 peaks and the duration of intonation phrases, and to explore the online sentence formulation in two typologically different languages...
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Talk by Markus Bader, Yvonne Portele, and Alice Schäfer, Tuesday 29th, 2-4 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Recent Trends in Linguistic Research Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, January 29, 2 – 4 pm in IG 0.251. Markus Bader, Yvonne Portele and Alice Schäfer will present "From word order to interpretation -- effects of referential form on language production and comprehension". Abstract: Our talk gives an overview of our recent research concerning the production and interpretation of different referential expressions. The main focus lies on the distinction between personal pronouns on the one hand and demonstrative and d-pronouns (dieser/der) on the other hand. With regard to sentence production, we show that the likelihood and acceptability of sentences with non-canonical word order does depend not only on the discourse status of the various referents (e.g., given versus new) but also on the referential form that is used to refer to them. In particular, under identical discourse conditions, objects are more easily preposed when they are realized as d-pronouns. With regard...
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