Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:The first name/last name asymmetry – Observations and Experimental investigation Date: July 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In my research I adopt the assumption that proper names are no different than common nouns. This assumption bears the name predicativism in the literature on proper names. For predicativists, proper names enter the syntax as property denoting expressions (Geurts 1997, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2008) (e.g. ⟦NPJohn⟧ = λxe. x is called John) and they get their referential interpretation by combining with covert elements. I believe that predicativism can provide potential insight into the way in which proper names interact with determiners in some languages, and into the structure of complex proper names and of proper names below the word level. The focus of this presentation will be to present some observations related to complex proper names (i.e., full names) and to propose an experiment to...

We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: On Eventive Nouns Date: July 7 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Nominals contribute temporal information to the utterance. This information may or may not be independent from the verbal predication time denoted by the matrix verb with which the nominal appears. Available theories in semantic literature establish the parameters that govern the nominal predication time: the type of determiner, the tense on the verb, or the context. While this covers most of the empirical landscape, there are examples that have been unaccounted for. In this talk, I will advocate for an extension to the existing theories which aims to capture the lexical temporal properties of nouns. I will argue that nouns separate into two classes: eventive and state nouns. Eventive nouns are characterized by having a hidden event argument that can be anaphoric to contextually supplied events. This allows us to explain...

We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The compositionality of adjective noun constructions – Investigating the comparison property of skillful-type adjectives Date: June 23 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In the last talk I gave in the colloquium, I addressed the core assumption of my thesis, namely that skillful-type adjectives - apart from being dependent on a comparison class, which makes them similar to tall-type adjectives - are dependent on an additional parameter, a comparison property. Given a value for these parameters, skillful-type adjectives turn out to be complex predicates after all, not modifiers, and therefore are able to combine with the noun via Intersection. I argued for a “context dependence only” approach to adjective denotations. In this talk, I will present the next chapter of my thesis. I will address further issues in connection with the comparison property of skillful-type adjectives and will argue that the comparison property is present as an actual argument to the adjective, not as...