Talk by Nadine Bade (Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Nadine Bade (Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: July 11, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Shared mechanisms behind matrix and embedded implicatures — evidence from priming Abstract: There is an ongoing debate in the literature on implicatures regarding what mechanisms are behind their derivation. Specifically, theories make different predictions for the role of different types of alternatives in implicature computation. More recently, this question has been tackled in the experimental literature by making use of a priming paradigm (Chemla & Bott, 2016, Rees & Bott 2018, Waldon & Degen 2021, Marty et al. 2024). I will offer an extension of the existing priming paradigm which includes embedded (downward-entailing) cases as well as cases highlighting the alternative visually (or not). The results suggest that both influence the rate to which implicatures are derived. I will...
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Talk by Carla Spellerberg (Amherst) and Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Carla Spellerberg (Amherst) and Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: July 4, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Nouns and their typical activities Abstract: In this talk, we present parts of our ongoing joint work on the semantics and processing of English adjective noun constructions such as the following: (1) a. Mary is a skillful dancer. b. Mary is a skillful ballerina. c. Mary is a skillful person. d. Mary is a skillful beginner. We assume that adjectives like skillful are underspecified, and capture this by means of a parameter in the semantics of these adjectives. Moreover, we assume that value of this parameter is supplied as a default by world knowledge associated with certain nouns, or is supplied by the context of utterance. We are interested in the (in)ability of nouns to provide a default interpretation: while...
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