We are happy to announce a talk by Yichi (Raven) Zhang (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: April 30, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Retraction and Quasi-Retraction
Abstract:
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We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (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: April 23, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Describing vs. depicting: two ways to convey meaning
Abstract:
In my talk, I will argue that meaning can be conveyed via two fundamentally different methods: (1) descriptively by the use of arbitrary conventionalized signs and (2) depictively by showing or demonstrating certain referents or events and thereby introducing a communicative act that asks the communication partner to extract conceptual or propositional information from this act, e.g. via ad-hoc analogy building. Formal linguistics and semantics in particular have originally only taken care of descriptive and conventionalized expressions and although recently the interplay of linguistic items and depictive components has been investigated, so far the question of what it actually means to interpret a depictive iconic gesture in...
We are happy to announce a talk by Maria Aloni (Amsterdam) 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: February 12, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Nothing is Logical
Abstract:
People often reason in ways that deviate from classical logic. An influential idea introduced by Grice is that these deviations are not logical mistakes but rather consequences of pragmatic enrichments derived as the product of rational interactions between cooperative language users. Challenging the Gricean tradition, the core hypothesis behind this research is that many of the enriched interpretations we observe in everyday conversation are not derived by Gricean reasoning, but rather result from biases due to our [human] preference to minimise cognitive effort. I will present two such biases that on our hypothesis affect both reasoning and interpretation: (i) a tendency to avoid emptiness (neglect-zero); and (ii) a negative bias towards the...
We are happy to announce a talk by Christopher Saure (Wuppertal) 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: February 5, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: The multiperspectival potential of indirect discourse
Abstract:
There is an overall consensus in the literature on perspectivization in language that indirect discourse (ID) does fundamentally not allow perspective shift of deictic expressions in its scope, which are thus obligatorily interpreted from the speaker’s context (e.g., Schlenker 2004). Consequently, research on perspective shift has been primarily focused on free indirect discourse (FID) for its seemingly unique display of multiperspectivity.
In this talk, I provide theoretical and empirical evidence that this prevalent view of ID does not accurately capture its true perspectival potential. Specifically, I argue that ID allows for the same indexicals to shift to the perspective of the reported utterance’s or thought’s original author as FID, namely spatio-temporal...
We are happy to announce a talk by Marius Wecker (Bochum) 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: January 29, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
The talk will be held in German.
Title: (Diskurse)-Commitments als Elemente politischer Positionierung. Ein theoretischer Ansatz zur Verknüpfung von formaler Pragmatik und Diskursanalyse
Abstract:
Pragmatik und Diskursanalyse repräsentieren zwei unterschiedliche Paradigmen innerhalb der Linguistik, was sich maßgeblich aus ihren jeweiligen ideengeschichtlichen Verortungen erklären lässt. Während die Pragmatik in der angloamerikanischen Tradition der analytischen Philosophie verankert ist, weist die Diskursanalyse – insbesondere in ihrem Rückgriff auf Foucault – deutliche Bezüge zu kontinentalphilosophischen Denkströmungen auf. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, beide Ansätze systematisch miteinander zu verbinden, da davon ausgegangen wird, dass sich ihre unterschiedlichen theoretischen Perspektiven und methodischen Zugänge wechselseitig fruchtbar ergänzen. Zu diesem Zweck greife ich mit dem Table-Model (Farkas & Bruce 2010) und dem Begriff des Commitments (Geurts 2019;...