Month: October 2023

We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert, Kurt Erbach and Magnus Poppe (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Experimental findings for a cross-modal account of dynamic binding in gesture-speech interaction Date: November 2, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In our talk, we theoretically and experimentally discuss dynamic semantic phenomena of pronoun and presupposition binding and point out how these phenomena reappear in the domain of gesture-speech interaction. Building on the unidimensional dynamic approach of Ebert & Ebert (2014) (based on Anderbois’ et al. (2015) account for handling appositive meanings), we suggest a cross-modal account where pointing gestures and iconic gestures introduce discourse referents for rigid designators that can be anaphorically picked up by pronouns (expressed in speech or gesturally). One option for the introduction of gestural discourse referents is by fixing a certain locus in the gesture space that stands for the gesture concept and can serve for further anaphorical uses. We will discuss such...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kurt Erbach (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: (Non-)Existence entailments of predicates (joined work with Dolf Rami) Date: October 26, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Object mass nouns like "furniture" and "equipment" are a focal point of countability research because they refer to intuitively countable objects but grammatically pattern with nouns that don't: "mud", "concrete", etc. One of the primary ways in which theories of countabiltiy differ is in their treatment of object denotation (as opposed to substance denotation) and how this interacts with other semantic operations. Despite all of these assumptions, little experimental work has been done on the conditions under which object mass nouns are acquired. This talk presents several experiments designed to test how it is that object mass nouns are acquired....