Category: Talks

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...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping  (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 April 29. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Transparent Negation: Retroactive specification and zilch Date: April 30th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: Judging from examples like the following, negation seems to be capable of blocking the accessibility of potential antecedents in its scope for anaphoric pronouns in subsequent discourse.   (1) No man walks in the park. *He whistles. (2) Peter doesn't own a car. *It's too expensive. On the other hand, there are several examples that cast some doubt on this assessment, be it the ease with which referential expressions outscope negation or the impact on further negation, just to name a few:   (3) Peter didn't...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jonathan Weinrich  (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. If you didn't do so yet, send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before April 22. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Gestural referents as SDRT anaphora Date: April 23rd Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: Lascarides & Stone (2009) outline a semantic approach to interpreting gestures. They integrate the gestures into the SDRT framework of Asher & Lascarides (2003) and allow them to combine by discourse relations. This involves the usage discourse referents in a DRT-like fashion. While they do not explicitly advocate the idea, a possible interpretation of their examples suggests that all gestural discourse referents are restricted in coreference by the same structural constraints as pronouns. As a start of my research into...

We are happy to announce a talk by Luisa Martí  (Queen Mary, University of London) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: The numeral+noun construction: typology and semantics Room: IG 4.301 Date: February 13th Time: 4pm - 6pm   Abstract: On the theoretical side, I show, building on previous work of mine, that putting together two theories, that of the typology of nominal number in Harbour (2014), and that of the syntax and semantics of numerals in Scontras (2014), leads to a number of predictions regarding how nouns will be marked for number when in the company of numerals (as in, e.g., English three apples, where apples is marked for plural) across languages. I consider two arguments for this proposal. The first argument is one of theoretical economy: in my proposal, one and the same set of tools accounts for both the number marking on the noun and the semantics of the construction. This is more economical than accounting for the semantics of...