Category: Semantics

We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Walter (Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language Date: February 9 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, the research agenda of the ViCom-project "Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language" will be presented. Perspective plays a crucial role in the interpretation of many utterances in everyday conversation. Usually, the perspective of the speaker is expressed, but there are cases where the perspective is shifted away from the speaker to some other salient individual. A prime example for this are instances of free indirect discourse (Schlenker, 2002; Maier, 2015). The expression of perspective is not limited to spoken and written language. It can also be expressed in speech-accompanying gestures (McNeill, 1992). There is only very little research on the interactions of perspective taking in gesture and speech, however (but see Hinterwimmer et al., 2021 and Ebert & Hinterwimmer,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Bücking (Siegen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: When the time of the story meets the time of the telling: On temporal metalepses from a linguistic perspective Date: February 2 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Following the introduction of the term into narratology by Genette (1983), Pier (2016, Sec. 1) defines narrative metalepsis as a „deliberate transgression between the world of the telling and the world of the told“. Perhaps the most famous example is the following, cited in Genette (1983, 235) from Balzac’s Illusions perdues, where the past time of the told story is said to overlap with the present time of the telling. (1) While the venerable churchman climbs the ramps of Angoulême, it is not useless to explain ... In my talk, I will tackle temporal metalepsis from a linguistic point of view. Specifically, I will ponder the merits and problems of four potential approaches to it, namely, literal interpretation, accommodation of imagination, accommodation of an operator...

We are happy to announce a talk by Klaus von Heusinger (Cologne) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Weak and strong definite articles in German and Evidentiality Date: January 26 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: German has a strong and a weak form of the definite article, which can be distinguished by their ability to merge with certain prepositions (strong: zu dem, weak: zum). The strong or full form is used in anaphoric and familiar contexts, and the weak or reduced form is used in contexts with a uniqueness condition (Ebert 1971, Schwarz 2009). The choice of one form in bridging contexts depends on the type of bridging: part-whole bridging contexts favor the weak form, and producer-product bridging prefer the strong form. We argue that the choice of the article form also depends on the way the speaker and hearer perceive the referent: if the referent is visible and touchable, the weak form is enhanced, while a less direct experience, say...

We are happy to announce a talk by Maximilian Berthold (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:  Nominal aktionsarten: a formal account Date: January 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: During my last presentation, I proposed that nouns separate into two classes: stative nouns (person, child) and eventive nouns (murderer, dancer). At the center of the theory is the hypothesis that eventive nouns are characterized by having an event argument that can be anaphoric to salient events in the context. This allows us to account for previously unexplained cases in the literature on the temporal interpretation of nominals. The aim of the present talk is to (i) bring together the theory on eventive nouns with a theory on aktionsarten, (ii) propose a formal analysis for the semantics of each aktionsart, and (iii) test the predictions with respect to their temporal interpretations....

We are happy to announce a talk by Ramona Hiller (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: A Corpus Study on German Privative Adjectives based on joint work with Carla Spellerberg Date: December 8 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I present a corpus-based study of nine counterfactual German adjectives that allegedly behave privatively which was conducted by a fellow student, Carla Spellerberg, and me in 2021. Since Partee’s (2010) influential suggestion that privative adjectives actually behave subsective on the coerced denotation of the noun they combine with, a lot of research has investigated the way these adjectives shift the noun denotation. Our intention with this thorough look at a large number of German adjective-noun combinations featuring alleged privative adjectives is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to learn more about noun shifts that can actually be observed in natural language when privative adjectives are involved and how often subsective and privative uses of the respective adjective occur. This allows us to add more much-needed empirical evidence to...