Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce two talks by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) and Kathryn Barnes (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Date: July 6, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Julien Foglietti Title: What’s in a last name? Semantics and experimental update Abstract: In this talk I will present further support to my proposal that last names used referentially carry a family membership presupposition. In the first section, I will walk us through the presupposition tests (Karttunen, 1973) applied to the use of referential last names. I will also introduce a new experimental design – inspired by Tonhauser (2012) – which will bring experimental support to my proposal.  In the second section of the talk, I will present the results of my previous experiments. These results show that; indeed, the notion of family membership is linked with how we use last names in referential expressions. Furthermore, these results will also open the question of how the content of the presupposition that...

We are happy to announce two talks by Sebastian Walter (Wuppertal) and Cécile Meier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Date: June 22, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct   Sebastian Walter Title: Are there salience differences between character and observer viewpoint gestures? Abstract: The present study investigates salience differences between character viewpoint gestures (CVGs) and observer viewpoint gestures (OVGs). Since co-speech gestures usually contribute not-at-issue meaning by default (cf. Ebert et al., 2020) and are thus backgrounded, it was hypothesized that there is no salience difference between CVGs and OVGs. A forced-choice study was conducted to investigate this hypothesis. The results show that there is no significant difference between CVGs and OVGs. Although further research is needed to fully clarify this matter, it is tentatively concluded that there is no difference in salience between the two gesture types. Therefore, the results of previous studies that found an overall preference for CVGs compared to OVGs (Hinterwimmer et al., 2021)...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: (Non-)Existence entailments of predicates (joined work with Dolf Rami) Date: June 15, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Based on systematic observations of entailments in natural language, we argue for the distinction of three different types of predicates: existence entailing, (existence) neutral, and nonexistence entailing predicates. Existence entailing predicates are those predicates that can only truthfully apply to existent entities, while nonexistence entailing predicates can only truthfully apply to nonexistent objects. Existence neutral predicates truthfully apply to both kinds of entities, thus do not give rise to (non-)existence entailments. We provide linguistic tests as well as examples to motivate this distinction.  In order to do so, we need to argue for a certain perspective e.g. on the alleged truth of sentences featuring in fiction. Then, we develop a multi-domain predicate logic inspired by certain versions of free logics in order...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kim Tien Nguyen (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: An empirical study on the wide scope of topical singular indefinites in German Date: June 1, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Endriss (2009) postulates that indefinites marked as aboutness topics take wide scope. Two topic marking devices in German are left dislocation and intonational marking (through a rising accent on the indefinite determiner). By means of three forced choice experiments, the study presented in this talk aims to test Endriss’ (2009) theory. As experiment 1 and 2 could not serve the purpose of testing this theory well due to not accounting for the potential contrastive reading and not controlling for the logical implication between the indefinite wide scope and indefinite narrow scope reading, experiment 3 was conducted with a different design to address these issues. The results of experiment 3 then showed highly significant effects of sentence structure...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kathryn Barnes (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Ideophones as iconic mixed items Date: May 25, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk outlines a semantic analysis of ideophones in German, such as plitsch platsch and holteridpolter, as iconic mixed items, combining both arbitrary descriptive meaning and iconic depictive meaning. These ideophones are therefore similar to expressive mixed items, such as cur or Köter, which combine at-issue descriptive and non-at-issue expressive meaning. The at-issue status of the two meaning components in ideophones can, however, vary according to various factors, as outlined in Barnes et al. (2022).  This analysis builds on the experimental work conducted by Barnes et al. (2022) on the at-issue status of sentence-medial adverbial ideophones in German, which showed that such ideophones were default non-at-issue, and provides an account for how said factors influence the at-issue status of ideophones. This iconic mixed items analysis could in future be applied to other...