Month: June 2019

We are very happy to announce a guest talk, which will take place on Friday, June 14, 2 – 4 pm in IG 4.301. Viola Schmitt (University of Vienna) and Frank Sode (Goethe University Frankfurt) „An anti-intellectualist treatment of German wissen (‘know’)“. Abstract: German wissen (‘know’) can embed both finite clauses (’wissen-FIN’) as well as infinitives (’wissen-INF ’). Based on novel empirical observations, we argue that wissen-INF cannot be reduced to the standard analysis of wissen-FIN , i.e. that wissen with infinitival complements does not involve a propositional attitude. As cross-linguistic evidence suggests that German wissen is not ambiguous, it follows that wissen-FIN cannot denote a propositional attitude, either. Accordingly, we require a new, uniform meaning for wissen. We derive this meaning by first considering wissen-INF, arguing that it combines semantic properties of ability modals with semantic properties of implicative verbs and enough to-constructions. We then show that these properties can also be used to characterize wissen-FIN , as long as certain non-standard...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, June 13, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Kai von Fintel (MIT) will present „The "only" connectives“. Abstract: We present work in progress on an understudied phenomenon: the use of exclusives and exceptives as sentential coordinators. Some examples from English:   (1) He is a very nice man, only he talks too much. (2) I would have helped you, except I had a meeting at work.   Constructions of this kind are attested in several languages.   We explore importing results from the study of adversative coordinators such as English *but*, French *mais*, German *aber*. Questions arise about the relation between the occurrences in (1) and (2) and ordinary uses of exclusives and exceptives as in (3) and (4):   (3) Heather only had one shot on goal. (4) Every student passed the test except Gordon.   Among other things, we discuss what happens to the focus-sensitivity and the presuppositional asymmetry of ordinary exclusives...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium, which will take place on Wednesday, June 12, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Emilie Destruel (University of Iowa) will present „The pragmatics of French (non-)prototypical clefts: Influence of the type of question on naturalness and interpretation“. Abstract: This paper investigates the interpretative properties of two clefts in French; the well-known c’est-cleft and the under-studied y’a-cleft. A prevalent assumption is that, when they signal narrow-focus, these two clefts differ with respect to exhaustivity; the former specifies a unique referent for the focus variable, but not the latter. Empirical evidence from a forced-choice task suggests that this analysis is going down the right path. Yet, the paper argues for a refined understanding of the conditions of use for these two clefts, positing that c’est- and y’a-clefts do not occur in the exact same narrow-focus context. Rather, their alternation is linked to the type of question asked—a feature absent from past studies. In a nutshell, I argue that c’est-clefts...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, June 11, 4 – 6 pm in SH 5.105. Zorica Puškar Gallien (ZAS, Berlin) will present „Disassembling and reassembling pronouns“. Abstract: Looking at personal pronouns in the Slavic family, local-person (1st and 2nd person) can be taken to differ from 3rd person in the following respects: (i) local-person pronouns have a unique form for every person+number combination (ii) 3rd person pronouns have an invariable base, to which affixes for gender and number are added; (iii) these suffixes are the typical affixes found on nouns as well. Moreover, despite lacking overt gender distinctions, local-person pronouns control gender agreement, indicating that (natural) gender must also be a part of their feature inventory. The goal of this talk is to provide a unified model of the form, locus and function of phi-features of pronouns that will account for their morphological distinctions and agreement properties. Following recent proposals that...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, June 4, 4 – 6 pm in SH 5.105. Professor Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California) will present „Head-final relative clauses and animacy effects: What corpus patterns and psycholinguistic studies can tell us“. Abstract: Animacy guides language processing in deep-reaching ways. In this talk, I explore the consequences of animacy for the production and processing of relative clauses, using corpus data and psycholinguistic studies. I will mostly focus on data from Mandarin Chinese and, if time permits, I will also present some preliminary data from Finnish. Both of these languages have relative clause structures that differ syntactically from Indo-European relative clauses in ways that can inform our understanding of how animacy influences fundamental aspects of language processing, such as argument structure. It is well-known that crosslinguistically, animate entities tend to occur in subject position (often also in the sentence-initial position). However, much of the prior...