From July 29-31, 2026, Carolin Reinert attended the 36th Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) conference at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she presented a joint poster with her co-author Carla Spellerberg (University of Massachusetts Amherst).
The poster, entitled "Telling World Knowledge and Linguistic Knowledge Apart: Experimental Evidence for a Meaning-Based Perspective on Nominal Event Arguments", presented new experimental evidence on how lexical meaning and world knowledge interact in the interpretation of adjective-noun combinations. Combining theoretical semantics with psycholinguistic experimentation, the project investigates which nouns encode typical activities as part of their linguistic meaning. The results of a maze experiment support a meaning-based account according to which both deverbal and certain non-deverbal nouns are associated with event arguments, contributing to our understanding of how linguistic knowledge differs from general conceptual knowledge.
The conference offered an inspiring environment for scientific exchange, with talks and poster sessions covering a wide range of topics in formal semantics. Presenting the poster sparked engaging discussions with...
We are happy to announce a talk by Pascal Hohmann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Date: July 16, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Before what happens? NPIs and expletive negation in German bevor-clauses
Abstract:
German 'bevor' ('before') clauses are an unusual environment in which two superficially opposite, negation-related phenomena surface in one and the same syntactic frame. On the one hand, 'bevor'-clauses license negative polarity items (NPIs) — such as 'mit der Wimper zucken' 'bat an eyelid', '(einen) Mucks machen' 'make a peep', 'ein Wort sagen' 'say a word', or 'je' 'ever'. On the other hand, they host expletive negation (EN): a 'nicht' that, in the right context, does not reverse the truth conditions of the clause it appears in (Krifka 2010):
(1)
Ich gehe nicht nach Hause, bevor das (nicht) fertig ist.
'I won't go home before that is (not) finished.' — both variants truth-conditionally equivalent
The talk pursues a semantic question: are...
We are happy to announce a joint session of the Semantics and Syntax Colloquia, featuring a talk by Chiara Marchetiello (Dublin).
The talk will take place on campus in IG 411.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: July 9, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: To be or not to be integrated: A formal account on [PDO] in Campania
Abstract:
In this talk, I discuss some initial observations on the syntactic integration of gesture found in the rich gestural inventories of the local languages spoken in Campania region (Italy). Specifically, I present two case studies on the gesture called [PALM-DOWN-OPEN-HAND-PRONE] ([PDO]). Based on new data collected from primary fieldwork I conducted in Campania, I show that [PDO] can be syntactically integrated into the grammar of the languages of Campania in two different ways. When [PDO] accompanies speech, it can be interpreted as an epistemic marker which indicates the speaker's certainty towards the truth-value conditions of...
We are happy to announce a talk by Prince Asiedu (Frankfurt) and a talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talks 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 2, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 7 pm c.t. (the two talks will be given consecutively within an extended colloquium slot.)
Prince Asiedu (Frankfurt)
Title: Multimodal iconicity of ideophones and Co-speech gestures in Akan
Abstract:
Many spoken languages with diverse typological features have ideophones, a special class of words defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). Ideophones share certain morphological and semantic properties (Kita 1997, Dingemanse 2015, Barnes 2024, Ebert and Steinbach 2024). They are an open lexical class. They depict rather than describe. There is an iconic relationship between form and meaning. They are marked expressions with specific grammatical properties, such as reduplication. They lie in the domain of sensory imagery....
We are happy to announce a talk by Andy Lücking (Chemnitz) 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: June 25, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: From Hand to Space: Decoding the Semantics of Iconic Gesture
Abstract:
Spatial gesture semantics takes seriously the dual nature of iconic gestures: they are both visuo-spatial events and objects of linguistic classification. The former is spelled out in terms of vector spaces, the latter in terms of classifiers. Linguistically classified gestures, in turn, can trigger the inference of implicatures, as is studied in discourse semantics. Hence, spatial gesture semantics draws on a range of standard semantic approaches, including (Davidsonian) event semantics, computational semantics, dynamic semantics, gesture studies, lexical and frame semantics, and -- of course -- vector semantics. This raises both concerns and aspirations for a unified formal account. The talk reviews (with a few improvements) spatial...