Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Maximilian Berthold (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: The anaphoricity of German temporal adjectives Date: June 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: German offers a rich inventory of temporal adjectives that serve to locate the time at which the property denoted by the noun hold of its referent. This talk investigates the semantic properties of the German adjective damalig (‘at the/that time’) which appears to have an anaphoric meaning component. Such anaphoricity would require any noun phrase modified by damalig to be supplied with a reference time by the context. This raises the questions how these noun phrases are temporally interpreted and how damalig is analyzed in a semantic framework. I provide empirical evidence that the interpretation of damalig-noun phrases is contextually determined which motivates my hypothesis that damalig should be analyzed as a time pronoun. The investigation of an anaphoric...

We are happy to announce a talk by Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Presupposition Projection and Linear Order – Variation Across Connectives Date: May 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The role of linear order for presupposition projection is a long-standing matter of theoretical controversy and empirical confusion. On the one hand, there’s a natural association of the `left-to-right’ unfolding of the linguistic signal and the gradual update of the contexts relative to which subsequent expressions are interpreted. On the other hand, connectives seem to display varying behavior in terms of whether later material can affect presuppositions of earlier expressions. In particular, conjunction has often been taken to be asymmetric with regards to projection, only allowing `left-to-right’ filtering (e.g., with the first conjunct supporting a presupposition in the second conjunct), whereas disjunction seems to also allow the reverse `right-to-left’ filtering (as in Partee’s `bathroom sentences’)....

We are happy to announce a talk by Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Intensified vagueness: semantics and pragmatics Date: May 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: What, if anything, is the semantic content of intensifiers like 'very', 'extremely', 'pretty', etc.? In this talk, I'll explore this question from the perspective of recent probabilistic approaches to degree semantics (Lassiter and Goodman, 2017). According to such approaches, vague predicates involve lexical uncertainty that is partially resolved through pragmatic reasoning. A sentence like "Scarlett is tall" is interpreted as `height(s)>=t`, where the value of t is inferred. How can a framework like this be extended to deal with sentences like "Scarlett is very / extremely / surprisingly tall"? Starting point is the model of Bennett and Goodman (2018). In this model, the intensifier is semantically vacuous, but its presence in the utterance triggers a manner implicature, which constitutes the...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kathryn Barnes (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: The At-Issue Status of Ideophones Date: May 6 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: It has long been acknowledged that words, phrases and sentences can all contribute information in di erent dimensions (cf. Grice 1975, Potts 2005). Constructions such as appositives, as well as expressives such as damn, have previously been shown to contribute not-at-issue information (cf. Potts 2005, Syrett & Koev 2014). Recent research into iconic enrichments has also focused on the at-issue status of these phenomena, with experiments on iconic co-speech gestures indicating that such gestures are default not at-issue (cf. Ebert, Ebert & Hörnig 2020, Tieu et al. 2017, Tieu et al. 2018). Similarly, it has been argued that ideophones, such as English splish-splash or German plitsch-platsch do not denote, but rather depict; instead of using arbitrary linguistic signs to refer to concepts, they iconically...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Transparent Negation in Dynamic Semantics Date: April 29 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Dynamic semantic systems are designed to capture the truth-conditions of complete sentences as well as certain facts about anaphoricity. The second aspect is described in terms of discourse referents and accessibility: possible antecedents introduce discourse referents which may or may not be accessed by 3rd person pronouns, resulting in an interpretation that lets pronouns covary with their antecedent's contribution and hence, allowing for bound readings even with indefinite antecedents behind the clause boundary. Within these systems, negation usually plays the role of a plug: it blocks the projection of discourse referents within its scope and thus reders them inaccessible to subsequent anaphoric elements. But, as is well known, this leads to some predictions that are not bourne out:...