Category: Semantics

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...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kurt Erbach (Frankfurt/Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:Varieties of mass/count interpretation of hybrid nouns Date: May 11, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk takes a closer look at mass and count uses of nouns including hybrid (a.k.a dual life, flexible) nouns like "chocolate", "fence", and "rope" and shifts from count to mass like from "apple" ('whole piece of fruit') versus "apple" ('sauce'). In particular, we look at a range of uses of nouns like "apple" and "potato" that differ in their range of meanings compared to each other and compared to other nouns that are often used in both count and mass contexts like chocolate. We motivate an analysis in which there are differences in the mass meanings of certain nouns, contra analyses that assume mass has no meaning (e.g. Barner & Snedeker 2005; Borer 2005; Rothstein 2010; a.o.), and rather than relegate countability or "one"-ness...

We are happy to announce a talk by Reginald Akuoko Duah (Berlin/Ghana) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Phylogenetics of conative animal calls: The case of Akan Date: May 4, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The present paper aims to expand our understanding of the phylogenetics of conative animal calls (CACs) by verifying their formal dissimilarity in closely related languages. To do so, we examine CACs in three varieties of Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo), i.e., Asante, Bono, and Fante, spoken in the Ashanti, Bono, and Central regions of Ghana, respectively. Given that Akan CACs have neither been documented nor analyzed in a systematic manner thus far, our research also seeks to improve the knowledge of human-to-animal communication in these three language verities. In harmony with the theoretical stance adopted in the most recent works on CACs (Andrason & Karani 2021; Andrason 2022; forthcoming; Andrason & Phiri 2023), we embrace a prototypical approach to linguistic categorization...

We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Investigating local readings of adjectives  Date: April 27, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I would like to report on the last chapter of my dissertation. In my dissertation I investigate the hypothesis that all adjective noun constructions involving local adjectives can be interpreted intersectively. This excludes non-local readings allowed by certain adnominal adjectives like possible, wrong and occasional (Larson, 2000; Schwarz 2006, 2020; Morzycki 2016). In previous talks in the colloquium, I addressed certain aspects of adjectives like skillful and argued for an analysis of these adjectives as context-dependent predicates. As a result, an intersective analysis is possible for such adjectives. However, there are further types of adjectives that are also local (in the sense of Schwarz 2020), but cannot receive an intersective analysis: temporal adjectives like former and modal adjectives like alleged. In this talk, I will...

We are happy to announce a talk by Volker Struckmeier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The many factors of ellipsis reconstruction – a multi-layered model Date: April 20, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Many theories try to explain the phenomenon of ellipsis interpretation and formation from the viewpoint of (mostly) single levels of linguistic description. All of these models have certain strong points.These successes in deriving empirical properties in ellipsis, in turn, makes their adherents attempt to specify more and more analytical restrictions and options in essentially the same framework, and with the same theoretical vocabulary, which yielded the initial advances. I will argue in this talk, that we should avoid overly specific analyses in which all (or almost all) relevant ellipsis descriptions stem from too few linguistic levels of representation. Instead of such single-level theories, I will propose an approach to ellipsis analysis which tries to combine strong points from each approach in a multi-layered...