Talk by Agata Renans (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Agata Renans (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 20, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Bare singular and plural kinds: Kind formation across languages Abstract:  Languages with a singular-plural and mass-count distinction as well as overt definite and indefinite determiners are predicted not to allow bare singular kinds (Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004). Ga (Kwa) is such a language (Campbell 2017; Renans 2016a,b, 2018, 2021) and yet both bare singular and plural count nouns can obtain a kind reading: while bare plural form is preferred for entities that are frequently encountered by the Ga speakers, bare singular form is preferred for rarely encountered entities. Moreover, definite NPs can never obtain the kind reading. Thus the Ga data point to a new mechanism of kind formation and to a previously unattested variation in kind...
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Talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 13, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Non-normally modified descriptions and (non-)existence entailing predicates (joint work with Dolf Rami) Abstract:  Existence entailments are a recurring topic in philosophy of language. According to a widespread view, they arise due to the truthful use of the so-called "existential quantifier" (going back to W.V.O. Quine's slogan "to be is to be the value of a bound variable"). This talk presents our alternative to this view that focuses on the position variables occupy in the logical form of sentences. It argues that the presence of (non-)existence entailments depends on the type of argument position that the (more correctly:) "particular quantifier" binds  into. After a brief sketch of the general architecture of the theory, we present linguistic evidence in favor...
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Talk by Alina Gregori (GU) in the Phonology colloquium

by Anna Pressler Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Alina Gregori in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday November 12th Time: 16-18 ct. Title: Individual strategies in multimodal hyperarticulation Abstract: Hyperarticulation refers to speakers adapting their articulation to the communicative needs of their interlocutor. Speakers enhance specific features to highlight certain elements or reduce others if the context allows (hypoarticulation). This has been found for acoustic features, and recently also for prosody-gesture interaction (Gregori & Kügler, under revision), licensed by focus and background contexts. These findings led to the conclusion that hyperarticulation is not a unimodal phenomenon but can be applied in multiple modalities. Following that finding, this study addresses whether individual speakers use hyperarticulation strategies similarly, if they prefer a strategy and if they combine them to highlight information in focus. Drawing on data from Gregori & Kügler (under revision), individual hyperarticulation is examined from a German conversational corpus. Results reveal that multimodal hyperarticulation is more stable than prosodic hyperarticulation is, as the...
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Talk by Bartosz Więckowski (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Bartosz Więckowski (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 6, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Some reflections on double negatives and un-Adj antonyms Abstract:  Our understanding of the logical behaviour of double negatives like 'not unhappy'  depends on our understanding of antonymic pairs like 'happy'/'unhappy'. In the literature, their members are either construed as contraries  (e.g., Horn 2017) or contradictories (e.g., Krifka 2007). In my talk, I shall suggest, building on previous work on subatomic negation  and negative predication, how, on both ways of understanding un-Adj antonyms, the logic and semantics of double negatives can be approached from a proof-theoretic perspective....
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