Category: Semantics

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...

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....