Category: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Marius Wecker (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: January 29, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. The talk will be held in German.  Title: (Diskurse)-Commitments als Elemente politischer Positionierung. Ein theoretischer Ansatz zur Verknüpfung von formaler Pragmatik und Diskursanalyse  Abstract:  Pragmatik und Diskursanalyse repräsentieren zwei unterschiedliche Paradigmen innerhalb der Linguistik, was sich maßgeblich aus ihren jeweiligen ideengeschichtlichen Verortungen erklären lässt. Während die Pragmatik in der angloamerikanischen Tradition der analytischen Philosophie verankert ist, weist die Diskursanalyse – insbesondere in ihrem Rückgriff auf Foucault – deutliche Bezüge zu kontinentalphilosophischen Denkströmungen auf. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, beide Ansätze systematisch miteinander zu verbinden, da davon ausgegangen wird, dass sich ihre unterschiedlichen theoretischen Perspektiven und methodischen Zugänge wechselseitig fruchtbar ergänzen. Zu diesem Zweck greife ich mit dem Table-Model (Farkas & Bruce 2010) und dem Begriff des Commitments (Geurts 2019;...

We are happy to announce a talk by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: December 18, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Adjectival Horn Scales Conzeptualized  Abstract:  Pairs of adjectives forming a Horn Scale like <smart, brilliant> are empirically quite well investigated with respect to whether they trigger scalar implicatures or not. The inference of a scalar implicature to the negation of the extreme adjective is rare and more readily derived if the extreme adjective is mentioned in the context (Doran et al. 2009). That mentioning is the not the only factor that governed the derivation of the implicature is until now under discussion. More recently, Hu et al. (2022) argued by investigating Language Models like GPT2 that the expectedness of the stronger alternative captures scalar implicature rates regardless whether the more informative alternative is mentioned in the context or...

We are happy to announce a talk by Lisa Hofmann (Stuttgart) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: December 11, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Negativity without negation: Counterfactual propositions and at-issueness Abstract:  This work addresses the question of what are the levels of representations involved in representing the discourse-effect of negation, by investigating the anaphoric polarity-sensitivity of negativity-tags. Anaphoric negativity­-tags (neg-­tags) occur naturally after negative clausal antecedents, but not affirmative ones (1). These include: (2a) English neither­-tags, (2b) ‘not even’ tags (Klima 1964), and (2c) factive uses of elliptical ‘why not’ interrogatives (Hofmann 2022; Anand et al. 2021). (1) I think that the defense lawyer’s closing statement {didn’t make / # made} an impact in this case. (2) a. Yeah, and neither did the testimonies.      b. Yeah, not even on the public perception.      c. Yeah, and the jury foreperson explained why...

We are happy to announce a talk by Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 27, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Intensional type logic: standard translation and non-standard interpretation Abstract:  The compositional interpretation of natural language is often carried out indirectly, by translation into a suitable type logic. This talk concerns the formal properties of such languages. More specifically, it is about Montague’s intensional type logic (IL), which has long been known to be almost expressively equivalent with its two-sorted substratum (Ty2): Gallin’s standard translation from IL to Ty2 can be reversed so as to cover nearly all of the latter, excepting only terms that are themselves of non-intensional types or contain such parameters. However, the proof depended on the so-called standard interpretation of both languages, according to which abstraction and quantification range over full set-theoretic domains. The...

We are happy to announce a talk by Agata Renans (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 20, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Bare singular and plural kinds: Kind formation across languages Abstract:  Languages with a singular-plural and mass-count distinction as well as overt definite and indefinite determiners are predicted not to allow bare singular kinds (Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004). Ga (Kwa) is such a language (Campbell 2017; Renans 2016a,b, 2018, 2021) and yet both bare singular and plural count nouns can obtain a kind reading: while bare plural form is preferred for entities that are frequently encountered by the Ga speakers, bare singular form is preferred for rarely encountered entities. Moreover, definite NPs can never obtain the kind reading. Thus the Ga data point to a new mechanism of kind formation and to a previously unattested variation in kind...