Talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Kind- vs. token-level modification Date: November 3 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: We use language to classify, subclassify, and simply group token entities, and also to attribute properties to the classes, subclasses and groups that we form. In this talk I examine the role of (mainly adjectival) modifiers in these function of language. There is ample evidence that languages distinguish grammatically between the use of modifiers to form a hierarchy of kind and subkind descriptions, to attribute ad-hoc properties to kinds (or subkinds), as well as to form subsets of entities of a given kind. I will survey various sorts of cases, focusing mainly on the elusive category of "relational" adjective, some challenges I have experienced in studying kind- vs. token-level adjectival modification, and some different techniques for exploring the different kinds of modification....
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Talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take online over Zoom. Please enroll in the OLAT course of the syntax colloquium to get the link or write to Katharina Hartmann. Titles: More is going on upstairs than downstairs: There is a penthouse in Kuce Date: October 31 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, we investigate polar interrogatives in Kuce (Kuche) or Ce (Che), a minority Plateau (Benue-Congo) language spoken in north-central Nigeria. The language employs a clause-final vowel lengthening strategy in polar questions (1-2). We, therefore, argue that: (a) the vowel quality of the question marker is determined by the final vowel of the clause; (b) the polar interrogative marking follows a strict-finality constraint; (c) the phenomenon is a main clause phenomena and (d) it is unavailable in focus construction. We show that unlike many lax prosodic languages with a single/uniform vowel, polar question marking....
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Talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Interpretation and placement of English -ly adverbials: a case for a new quantitative approach Date: October 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The interplay of position and interpretation of adverbials has received considerable attention over the last 20 years. But even for English, there is no clear consensus on which readings need to be distinguished, which orderings of adverbials are grammatical, and whether, in the case of -ly adverbials, the semantic analysis should be based on the semantics of the base form or not. The aim of my talk is to discuss the ways quantitative measures like collocations and distributional semantics can be leveraged to clarify this picture. After an overview of the problems, I will discuss three case studies illustrating three different approaches. The first case study shows that collocations of the base adjectives in attributive position annotated for the ontological category of the head allow a more finegrained look at the consistency of...
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Talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: On the theoretical and empirical challenges of multiple agreement with subjects and objects Date: October 24 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk will focus on languages in which a finite verb agrees with the subject (S) and object (O), and in which O-agreement is argued to be conducted by a head high in the syntactic structure, such as T/Infl. Of particular interest are the verbal morphological templates in which O-agreement is realised by affixes closer to the verbal stem than S-affixes (Hungarian, Trommer 2003, E Kiss 2019; Tundra Nenets, Nikolaeva 2014; Khanty, Mansi, Mordvin, E Kiss 2019, Quechuan, Myler 2017, Nez Perce Deal 2017). Under Mirror Principle, this indicates that O-agreement applies before S-agreement, which is problematic for the standard Minimalist view of agreement, under which the subject should act as an intervener. The puzzle will...
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Talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt)

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:The first name/last name asymmetry – Observations and Experimental investigation Date: July 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In my research I adopt the assumption that proper names are no different than common nouns. This assumption bears the name predicativism in the literature on proper names. For predicativists, proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g. ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. I believe that predicativism can provide potential insight into the way in which proper names interact with determiners in some languages, and into the structure of complex proper names and of proper names below the word level. The focus of this presentation will be to present some observations related to complex proper names (i.e., full names) and to propose an experiment to...
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