Category: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Klaus von Heusinger (Köln) 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: May 28, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Island constraints for conceptual anaphora Abstract: Conceptual anaphors, as in (1), from Morton Ann Gernsbacher (1991: 82), can access antecedents in negative contexts, in contrast to individual anaphors, which cannot. (1) I want a new Harley Sportster. They are really powerful, but they’re gas-efficient. In this talk, we compare the accessibility of antecedents for individual versus conceptual (“sense”) anaphors in (i) lexical islands, (ii) pseudo-incorporated nouns, and (iii) intensional contexts. We report results from an acceptability judgment study and an eye-tracking study. Our initial findings suggest that neither individual nor conceptual anaphors can access nouns within lexical islands. Furthermore, conceptual anaphors appear to be insensitive to pseudo-incorporated and intensional contexts, whereas individual anaphors are sensitive to these contexts....

We are happy to announce a talk by Yichi (Raven) Zhang (Düsseldorf) 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: April 30, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Retraction and Quasi-Retraction Abstract: Download abstract here...

We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (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: April 23, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Describing vs. depicting: two ways to convey meaning Abstract: In my talk, I will argue that meaning can be conveyed via two fundamentally different methods: (1) descriptively by the use of arbitrary conventionalized signs and (2) depictively by showing or demonstrating certain referents or events and thereby introducing a communicative act that asks the communication partner to extract conceptual or propositional information from this act, e.g. via ad-hoc analogy building. Formal linguistics and semantics in particular have originally only taken care of descriptive and conventionalized expressions and although recently the interplay of linguistic items and depictive components has been investigated, so far the question of what it actually means to interpret a depictive iconic gesture in...

We are happy to announce a talk by Maria Aloni (Amsterdam) 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: February 12, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Nothing is Logical  Abstract: People often reason in ways that deviate from classical logic. An influential idea introduced by Grice is that these deviations are not logical mistakes but rather consequences of pragmatic enrichments derived as the product of rational interactions between cooperative language users. Challenging the Gricean tradition, the core hypothesis behind this research is that many of the enriched interpretations we observe in everyday conversation are not derived by Gricean reasoning, but rather result from biases due to our [human] preference to minimise cognitive effort. I will present two such biases that on our hypothesis affect both reasoning and interpretation: (i) a tendency to avoid emptiness (neglect-zero); and (ii) a negative bias towards the...

We are happy to announce a talk by Christopher Saure (Wuppertal) 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: February 5, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: The multiperspectival potential of indirect discourse  Abstract:  There is an overall consensus in the literature on perspectivization in language that indirect discourse (ID) does fundamentally not allow perspective shift of deictic expressions in its scope, which are thus obligatorily interpreted from the speaker’s context (e.g., Schlenker 2004). Consequently, research on perspective shift has been primarily focused on free indirect discourse (FID) for its seemingly unique display of multiperspectivity.  In this talk, I provide theoretical and empirical evidence that this prevalent view of ID does not accurately capture its true perspectival potential. Specifically, I argue that ID allows for the same indexicals to shift to the perspective of the reported utterance’s or thought’s original author as FID, namely spatio-temporal...