Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Weskott (University of Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium where he will present joint work with Johanna Klages, Elsi Kaiser, and Anke Holler. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Testing Perspectivization Effects Online: The Case of Counteridenticals Date: December 9 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Taking on another person's perspective is a fundamental part of human cognition. Linguistic expressions play an important role in perspectivization: they can signal a shift in perspective, and their interpretation can be sensitive to different perspectives (see Bylinina et al., 2015). Although there is quite a lot of literature on the semantics and pragmatics of perspective shifting and perspective sensitivity, experimental investigations of the comprehension processes involved is relatively sparse, especially with respect to online measures. In this talk, we present a visual word eye-tracking experiment in which participants were presented with linguistic stimuli that contained counteridenticals, i.e. counterfactuals of the form...

We are happy to announce a talk by Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place in a hybrid format. If you want to attend the talk on campus, you can just join us in IG 4.301. In case you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title:The interpretative options of anaphoric complex demonstratives Date: December 2 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present experimental evidence from a ‘yes’/’no’ judgement task and two acceptability rating studies (Experiments 1a-c) for the claim made in Hinterwimmer (2019) that sentences with two anaphorically interpreted complex demonstratives are less acceptable than sentences with two anaphorically interpreted definite descriptions and sentences where one of the two previously introduced referents is picked up by a complex demonstrative, while the other one is picked up by a definite description. The results of Experiment 1a and 1b are in principle compatible with the account argued for in Hinterwimmer (2019), according to which the...

We are happy to announce a talk by Aleksandra Ćwiek (ZAS Berlin) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Sorting the Mischmasch of German Ideophones Date: November 25 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Most of the articles or lectures on ideophones begin with quoting Mark Dingemanse’s work. This one will be no different. An ideophone is “a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse, 2019, 16). Words like boing or swish evoke a sense of sound and movement, respectively. However, Indo-European languages have been called “ideophonically impoverished” (Diffloth, 1972, 440; Nuckolls, 2004). In this project, I tackle this problem by inspecting the breadth of ideophones in German. I will present a data set of German ideophones that my colleagues and I collected from children’s books. Overall, we collected a total of 1,020-word forms and 650 lemmas, i.e., unified word forms. In this talk, I will present the data and discuss some further ideas to refine it. In addition,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (University of Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Desire reports and conditionals Date: November 18 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Heim (1992) proposes a semantics for desire reports which “sees a hidden conditional in every desire report.” Since Heim’s proposal doesn’t share many of the short-comings of a Hintikka-semantics for desire reports, it has subsequently been adopted by many authors. Interestingly, the idea of hidden conditionals – “[a]n important feature of this analysis” (Heim, 1992) – has been marginalized, e.g., Portner & Rubinstein (2020); Giannakidou & Mari (2021), or explicitly rejected, e.g., Levinson (2003); Villalta (2008); Lassiter (2011, 2017), in subsequent work. The connection between desire reports and conditionals has recently received new attention: von Fintel & Iatridou (2017, 2020) observe that in many languages the morphology that is used to mark a conditional as counterfactual features prominently in reports of “unattainable wishes” (von Fintel & Iatridou, 2020). What is...

We are happy to announce a talk by Markus Steinbach (University of Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Visual answers - response strategies in German Sign Language Date: November 11 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Response particle systems vary cross-linguistically regarding the number and discourse functions of the response elements. Some languages have two particles (English yes, no), others have three (German ja, nein, doch). Traditional accounts of response systems distinguish truth-based and polarity-based systems (Pope 1976, Jones 1999). In truth-based systems, yes-type answers confirm the truth of the antecedent proposition and no-type answers reject it. In polarity-based systems, response particles signal the polarity of the response clause: positive (yes-type) or negative (no-type). Languages may also employ both systems and use no to reject the truth of a proposition or signal the negative polarity of the response. Languages with a three-particle system often have a dedicated response particle for rejecting negative propositions, although other dedicated particles exist, too (Roelofsen & Farkas 2015). Concerning the visual-gestural modality, very little...