Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Luisa Martí  (Queen Mary, University of London) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: The numeral+noun construction: typology and semantics Room: IG 4.301 Date: February 13th Time: 4pm - 6pm   Abstract: On the theoretical side, I show, building on previous work of mine, that putting together two theories, that of the typology of nominal number in Harbour (2014), and that of the syntax and semantics of numerals in Scontras (2014), leads to a number of predictions regarding how nouns will be marked for number when in the company of numerals (as in, e.g., English three apples, where apples is marked for plural) across languages. I consider two arguments for this proposal. The first argument is one of theoretical economy: in my proposal, one and the same set of tools accounts for both the number marking on the noun and the semantics of the construction. This is more economical than accounting for the semantics of...

We are happy to announce a talk by Roland Hinterhölzl  (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: A situation-based approach to (pro)nominal reference Room: IG 4.301 Date: January 30th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: I will argue that nominal expressions relate an individual and a situation. In particular, I will discuss the interpretation of weak, strong and anaphoric or referential DPs and argue that the interpretation of their situation argument crucially depends on the presuppositions imposed by their determiner, with the default being (in the absence of a presupposition) that the situation argument is identified with the event denoted by the verb. ...

We are happy to announce the first talk of this decade by Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect Room: IG 4.301 Date: January 16th Time: 4pm - 6pm Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) The study I will present investigates the interaction of tense, aspect and syntactic position of temporal adverbials in the interpretation of sentences that are ambiguous with regard to their temporal interpretation. Sentences with specific time-frame adverbials in German and English (e.g., in three hours”; see example in (1)) are ambiguous between a durative reading, given in (1a), in which the event takes place in the time interval specified by the adverbial, and an inceptive reading, given in (1b), in which the event will start after this time interval. A series of experiments on German showed that the syntactic position of a temporal adverbial as well as verbal tense influences sentence...