Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Amir Anvari (Paris) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Amir Anvari pre-recorded his talk for our meeting. Please send a mail to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de to receive the link. By this, you also register for the discussion session at our usual time. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: The variable-based account of indexical shift redux Date: June 25th Time: 4pm - 6pm  --- Abstract: The observation that in some languages indexicals can shift, i.e., can refer to objects other than those that make up the actual speech event, was something of a bombshell thrown by Philippe Schlenker in his 1999 dissertation, with quite far reaching consequences both for philosophy of language and linguistic analysis proper. Schlenker took the data to be pointing to a view of language on which attitudinal predicates quantify over contexts and indexicals involve context variables that,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (GU) and Christian Ebert (cabuu GmbH) next W E D N E S D A Y at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Please note that you need to register beforehand. Please send a mail to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before Wednesday 3pm. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on W E D N E S D A Y at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Pointing and its meaning Date: June 3rd Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: We propose a compositional analysis of pointing plus different speech expressions (indefinites, definites, and demonstratives in particular), where the pointing gesture has a fixed ‚lexical‘ semantics and contributes a certain conventional meaning depending on its accompanying phrase. As for pointing gestures with demonstratives, we argue that demonstratives can be analysed as semantically vacuous entities that only function as ‘dimension shifters’ from the non-at-issue to the at-issue dimension. The (‚lexical‘)...

We are happy to announce a talk by Alda Mari (Paris) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Please note that you need to register beforehand. Please send a mail to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before thursday 3pm. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts). Title: Subjunctive belief:  the common-ground-as-default-rule and its pragmatic effects Date: May 28th Time: 4pm - 6pm --- Abstract: In contrast to most other Romance languages, `believe' commonly and prescriptively takes subjunctive in Italian, though indicative is found as well, the choice of indicative or subjunctive has semantic effects. We show that the indicative with `believe' is used when the belief statement describes the personal mental state of the holder of the attitude, an interpretation that follows from the traditional Hintikkean semantics. In contrast, we show that subjunctive with `believe' is used to mark a relation between the content of belief and the discourse context.  To...

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...