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...
We are happy to announce a talk by Edgar Onea (Graz) 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 11, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: A Static Semantics for Gender and Anaphora
Abstract:
This talk develops a compositional semantics in which the basic nominal objects manipulated by grammar are not individuals, but loci: formal representational addresses under which individuals are stored. The central motivation comes from grammatical gender. Unlike person or number, grammatical gender does not normally contribute an ordinary individual-level property: a German masculine pronoun, for instance, need not refer to a male individual. Yet gender constrains cross-sentential anaphora. The question is therefore how a feature can matter for interpretation without being a truth-conditional property of the individual.
I propose that grammatical gender is a property of representations rather than of individuals. A locus can represent an individual while also carrying...
We are happy to announce a talk by Klaus von Heusinger (Köln) 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: May 28, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Island constraints for conceptual anaphora
Abstract:
Conceptual anaphors, as in (1), from Morton Ann Gernsbacher (1991: 82), can access antecedents in negative contexts, in contrast to individual anaphors, which cannot.
(1) I want a new Harley Sportster. They are really powerful, but they’re gas-efficient.
In this talk, we compare the accessibility of antecedents for individual versus conceptual (“sense”) anaphors in (i) lexical islands, (ii) pseudo-incorporated nouns, and (iii) intensional contexts. We report results from an acceptability judgment study and an eye-tracking study. Our initial findings suggest that neither individual nor conceptual anaphors can access nouns within lexical islands. Furthermore, conceptual anaphors appear to be insensitive to pseudo-incorporated and intensional contexts, whereas individual anaphors are sensitive to these contexts....
We are happy to announce a talk by Yichi (Raven) Zhang (Düsseldorf) 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:
Download abstract here...
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...