Author: Anke Himmelreich

We are very happy to announce a guest talk, which will take place on Wednesday, July 17, 2 – 4 pm in IG 4.301. Kai Wehmeier (UCI) will present „On Boxes and Quantifiers“. Abstract: Whether operations such as necessitation or universal quantification create extensional or intensional contexts depends on what counts as an extension. In "Pragmatics and Intensional Logic" (1970), Montague proposes an asymmetric approach that makes the box an intensional but the standard first-order quantifier an extensional context. In this talk, I will investigate whether there are any formal grounds for such differential treatment of boxes and quantifiers. To this end, I develop some general theory of notational variance between interpreted formal languages. I show that extant results do indeed point to a lack of complete correspondence between modal operator and ordinary first-order languages. Nevertheless, a single notational innovation reveals that modal languages really are notational variants of (compositional fragments of) certain first-order languages in a very strict sense. I conclude that...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, July 15, 4 – 6 pm in IG 254. Alina Fester and Johannes Mursell will present „Coordination and focus - The easy cases and WHAT?“. Abstract: In this talk, we discuss focus in coordinated structures with particular emphasis on coordinated structures containing echo-wh phrases. We will concentrate on certain restrictions on their occurrences, problematic factors, and evaluate possible ideas to experimentally gather data to supplement our judgments. These data will then be the basis for further considerations of possible analyses.     You are cordially invited!...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, July 11, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Yasutada Sudo (UCL) will present „The Plurality Inference as a Non-Propositional Quantity Implicature“. Abstract: Plural nouns typically give rise to 'plurality inferences', e.g. "Andrew wrote papers" implies that Andrew wrote multiple papers, not just one. Howevder, plurality inferences are not always present, e.g. "Andrew did not write papers" does not mean the same thing as "Andrew did not write multiple papers". There are three types of approaches to the plurality inference: (i) the scalar implicature approach (Spector 2007, Zweig 2009, Ivlieva 2013, Mayr 2015), (ii) the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010, Grimm 2013, Martí 2018), and (iii) the antipresupposition approach (Sauerland 2003, Sauerland et al. 2005). In this talk, I will propose a new scalar implicature account. The idea of the scalar implicature account is that the plural is semantically number-neutral, and the...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium, which will take place on Wednesday, July 10, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Fatima Hamlaoui (Toronto) will present „Pre-Stem Object Markers and the Verb-Subject Word Order in (Proto-)Bantu“. Abstract: Inversion constructions are a widespread phenomenon in Bantu languages. Some languages, like Basaá (A43, Cameroon), however do not allow postverbal subjects, neither in matrix nor in embedded clauses. In a family in which word order is generally considered flexible, the question arises as to why some languages have a fairly rigid word order and which type of word order characterized Proto-Bantu. This talk concentrates on SV/VS order in relative clauses, a type of clause in which word order can hardly be motivated by the information status of its arguments. Based on a sample of 150 Narrow Bantu languages, 6 (non-Bantu) Bantoid languages and 9 (non-Bantoid) Niger-Congo languages, we first discuss issues relating to the most frequent word order in...

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, July 4, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Hans Christian Schmitz (Frauenhofer FKIE) will present „Herausforderungen der angewandten KI“. Abstract: Ich habe vor, (i) Grundbegriffe aktueller KI-Methoden zu erläutern. Darauf aufbauend möchte ich diskutieren, (ii) wie rationale und heuristische Entscheidungen unterstützt werden sollten und (iii) wie kollektives Entscheiden zur Verbesserung von Systemen beitragen kann, womit ich das Gebiet der Informatik „ein Stück weit“ verlasse. Der KI wird derzeit ja einiges an Aufmerksamkeit zuteil und große Hoffnungen („Schlüsseltechnologie […], um erfolgreich im internationalen Wettbewerb zu bestehen“, KI-Strategie der Bundesregierung) und sonstige Erwartungen werden mit ihr verbunden, so dass das Thema vielleicht von allgemeinem Interesse ist. Um es anteilig auch im engeren Rahmen der Linguistik interessant zu machen, bemühe ich mich, verschiedene Querbezüge zur (linguistischen) Sprachanalyse herzustellen und dadurch anregend zu wirken.   You are cordially invited!...