Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Kim Tien Nguyen (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: An empirical study on the wide scope of topical singular indefinites in German Date: June 1, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Endriss (2009) postulates that indefinites marked as aboutness topics take wide scope. Two topic marking devices in German are left dislocation and intonational marking (through a rising accent on the indefinite determiner). By means of three forced choice experiments, the study presented in this talk aims to test Endriss’ (2009) theory. As experiment 1 and 2 could not serve the purpose of testing this theory well due to not accounting for the potential contrastive reading and not controlling for the logical implication between the indefinite wide scope and indefinite narrow scope reading, experiment 3 was conducted with a different design to address these issues. The results of experiment 3 then showed highly significant effects of sentence structure...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kathryn Barnes (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Ideophones as iconic mixed items Date: May 25, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk outlines a semantic analysis of ideophones in German, such as plitsch platsch and holteridpolter, as iconic mixed items, combining both arbitrary descriptive meaning and iconic depictive meaning. These ideophones are therefore similar to expressive mixed items, such as cur or Köter, which combine at-issue descriptive and non-at-issue expressive meaning. The at-issue status of the two meaning components in ideophones can, however, vary according to various factors, as outlined in Barnes et al. (2022).  This analysis builds on the experimental work conducted by Barnes et al. (2022) on the at-issue status of sentence-medial adverbial ideophones in German, which showed that such ideophones were default non-at-issue, and provides an account for how said factors influence the at-issue status of ideophones. This iconic mixed items analysis could in future be applied to other...

We are happy to announce a talk by Kurt Erbach (Frankfurt/Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:Varieties of mass/count interpretation of hybrid nouns Date: May 11, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk takes a closer look at mass and count uses of nouns including hybrid (a.k.a dual life, flexible) nouns like "chocolate", "fence", and "rope" and shifts from count to mass like from "apple" ('whole piece of fruit') versus "apple" ('sauce'). In particular, we look at a range of uses of nouns like "apple" and "potato" that differ in their range of meanings compared to each other and compared to other nouns that are often used in both count and mass contexts like chocolate. We motivate an analysis in which there are differences in the mass meanings of certain nouns, contra analyses that assume mass has no meaning (e.g. Barner & Snedeker 2005; Borer 2005; Rothstein 2010; a.o.), and rather than relegate countability or "one"-ness...