Category: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Nadine Bade (University of Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Word learning with visual animations as a window into the Triggering Problem — introducing a new paradigm Date: May 5 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss a new methodology using a word learning task with visual animations to approach the triggering problem for presuppositions, which is the long standing theoretical issue of predicting which entailments of natural language expressions end up presupposed. Recent literature discusses the need of an algorithm do determine what parts of meanings become presuppositions, that is an explicit rule that predicts a trivalent output (T,F, #) of a bivalent input (T, F) (Abrusán, 2011; Schlenker, 2021). Earlier arguments involving iconic presupposition triggers suggest that presuppositions are generated productively from iconic expressions, which could not encode the presupposition conventionally (Schlenker, 2019; Tieu et al., 2019; Schlenker, 2021). We conducted two pilot experiments using a word learning task with a change...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kat Barnes (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Subjectivity in iconicity: Ideophones and predicates of personal taste Date: April 28 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The perception of iconicity appears to be influenced by multiple factors including social and cultural conventions (cf. Dingemanse 2011), language experience (cf. Occhino et al. 2017; Sehyr & Emmorey 2019), and mostly notably speaker judgement. Kawahara (2020) noted the subjective nature of ideophones in Japanese and this also appears to be the case in German, where contradicting an ideophone appears to result in faultless disagreement as in (1). (1) a. Peter läuft die Treppe holterdiepolter herunter.           Peter runs the stairs IDEO down           'Peter is running helterskelter down the stairs.'     b. Naja, er läuft die Treppe nicht holterdiepolter herunter. Er läuft sie eher rumpeldipumpel runter.         INT he runs the stairs not IDEO down he runs them rather IDEO...

We are happy to announce a talk by Cécile Meier (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Arbitrary mapping and object frequency: On cars and airplanes  Date: April 21 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Usually, the meaning-form relation of count nouns is thought to be arbitrary. This paper argues that object frequency in image data sets correlate with the type of reading of count nouns (taxonomic reading and specimen referring reading). If an object is rare in image data sets it is accessible to a taxonomic reading and an atomic kind reading derived from that reading. If an object is frequent in image data sets (and the objects are not similar to each other) a taxonomic reading is not available. If object frequency is relevant for visual perception and its reflex in semantic memory is relevant for the range of semantic types of count nouns then the semantic type (a formal linguistic feature) must be iconic....

We are happy to announce a talk by Jacopo Romoli (Univerity of Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title:Implicating in semi-cooperative contexts (joint work with Paul Marty, Yasutada Sudo, and Richard Breheny) Date: February 17 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In ordinary conversations, disjunctive sentences like June visited Frankfurt or Düsseldorf are commonly understood as conveying that she didn’t visit both cities (exclusivity), and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two cities she visited (ignorance) (Grice 1975, Gazdar 1979, Horn 1972 a.o.). There is general consensus that these inferences are not conveyed as part of the literal meaning, but rather they arise as implicatures. On the standard pragmatic approach, implicatures are the output of implicit reasoning on the part of the hearer over why the speaker said what she said and why not something else (Grice 1975, Horn 1972, Gazdar 1979, Sauerland 2004, Geurts 2010, Chemla 2010, van Rooij &...

We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (GU Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place online. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Title: Nominal Aktionsarten Date: February 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Based on a convincing amount of semantic properties shared by verbal tense and the German temporal adjective damalig, I concluded in my last presentation that the adjective is a functional nominal tense. In this talk, I want to address what initially appear to be semantic differences between damalig and verbal tense. First, intuitions may suggest that damalig exhibits semantic restrictions with particular types of nouns such as die damalige Milch (‘the milk at the time‘). Second, German native speakers share the intuition that sentences such as Der damalige Taxifahrer sang die ganze Fahrt ('The taxi driver at the time sang the whole ride) is odd in contexts in which damalig‘s reference time is close to the time of utterance (e.g., yesterday/last week). This behavior would be undesirable if we maintain...