Category: Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Alda Mari (Paris) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Please note that you need to register beforehand. Please send a mail to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before thursday 3pm. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Subjunctive belief:  the common-ground-as-default-rule and its pragmatic effects Date: May 28th Time: 4pm – 6pm — Abstract: In contrast to most other Romance languages, `believe‘ commonly and prescriptively takes subjunctive in Italian, though indicative is found as well, the choice of indicative or subjunctive has semantic effects. We show that the indicative with `believe‘ is used when the belief statement describes the personal mental state of the holder of the attitude, an interpretation that follows from the traditional Hintikkean semantics. In contrast, we show that subjunctive with `believe‘ is used to mark a relation between the content of belief and the discourse context.  To...

We are happy to announce another talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 14. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Propositionalisms Date: May 14th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: Roughly, propositionalism is the thesis that informational content is always truth conditional (Grzankowski 2013). In particular, the objects of psychological attitudes need to be propositions – in some sense, which includes propositional concepts (cf. Blumberg 2018) as well as perspectival content (Lewis 1979). Thus propsitionalists seek to reduce attitudes towards "intentional“ objects in terms of propositional attitudes: someone who is looking for a unicorn strives for it to be the case that he or she finds a unicorn (Quine 1956);...

We are happy to announce a talk by Ede Zimmermann  (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. To do so, please send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before May 7. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) and a handout on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Extensions in compositional semantics Date: May 7th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: The talk scrutinizes the very notion of extension, which is central to many contemporary approaches to natural language semantics. The starting point is a puzzle about the connection between learnability and extensional compositionality, which is frequently made in semantics textbooks: given that extensions are not part of linguistic knowledge, how can their interaction serve as a basis for explaining it? Before the puzzle is resolved by recourse to the set-theoretic nature of intensions, new clarifying observations on extensions...