Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Peter Gärdenfors (Lund) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Date: November 12, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Pantomime as a stepping stone to protolanguage Abstract: I will begin by arguing that pantomime has been an important factor in the evolution of teaching that can be used without linguistic communication. Then I will show that there are two types of pantomime: directive (showing) and informative (telling). Informative pantomime can be seen as a breakthrough in the evolution of communication. Finally, I will discuss some ideas about how informative pantomime evolved into protosign and protospeech....

We are happy to announce a talk by Veneeta Dayal (Yale) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Date: November 5, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Demonstrative to Definite: What Changes and What Stays the Same Abstract: I posit that a demonstrative has two parts to its meaning, an indexical part and a contrastive part. The first demarcates a possibly proper sub-domain in the context of evaluation within which a unique referent must be established. It must also be possible for the referent to be contrasted with another entity in the context of evaluation or outside it, the property of anti-uniqueness. A definite lacks anti-uniqueness, and it also lacks indexicality, simply requiring its referent to be unique in the context of evaluation. I show how this distinction accounts for certain well-known facts. The definite article is compatible with proper names in many languages. A proper name, suitably adjusted for type, satisfies the uniqueness requirements of...

We are happy to announce a talk by Giuliano Armenante (Potsdam) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/62660316332?pwd=94KnkxFireEQFCWBGpi35ZwrClwoLa.1  Date: October 29, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: There is more than one way to X-mark: The lesson from West Africa Abstract: Conditionals expressing remote possibilities are often morphologically distinguished from those expressing open possibilities through specialized “X-marking” morphology (von Fintel & Iatridou 2023). This morphology includes both repurposed fake past forms (as in English) and dedicated counterfactual markers (e.g. Hungarian -nA) (Iatridou 2000). Competing modal (Mackay 2019; Schulz 2014) and temporal analyses (Arregui 2009; Ippolito 2013) have been proposed for English fake past. Recent cross-linguistic work, however, reveals a more nuanced picture, suggesting that temporal and modal contributions to X-marking can be dissociated (M. Kaufmann & Todorović 2024; S. Kaufmann 2023; Mizuno 2023). In this talk, I contribute to this debate by presenting novel data from three Kwa languages (Niger-Congo): one tensed language, Akan, and two tenseless...