Talks

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...

We are happy to announce a talk by Morgan Moyer (Barcelona) 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 22, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Meaning Beyond Truth: A Psychosemantic Approach to Affective Meaning Abstract: How are different kinds of linguistic meaning represented and accessed in cognition? Research in semantics and pragmatics distinguishes truth-conditional content from presuppositions, conventional implicatures, and other kinds of non-at-issue meaning. Experimental pragmatics and psycholinguistics, meanwhile, investigates how linguistic information becomes available during comprehension, how pragmatic inferences unfold over time, and how semantic features organize conceptual representations. Yet the relationship between these linguistic distinctions and the cognitive status of the content they characterize remains poorly understood. This talk brings together two strands of experimental research to investigate this relationship. The first examines the cognitive prominence of affective valence relative to truth-conditional conceptual features. Using speeded categorization and similarity judgments, I investigate whether affective information is especially accessible and...

We are happy to announce a talk by Pascal Hohmann (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.  Date: July 16, 2026 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Before what happens? NPIs and expletive negation in German bevor-clauses Abstract: German 'bevor' ('before') clauses are an unusual environment in which two superficially opposite, negation-related phenomena surface in one and the same syntactic frame. On the one hand, 'bevor'-clauses license negative polarity items (NPIs) — such as 'mit der Wimper zucken' 'bat an eyelid', '(einen) Mucks machen' 'make a peep', 'ein Wort sagen' 'say a word', or 'je' 'ever'. On the other hand, they host expletive negation (EN): a 'nicht' that, in the right context, does not reverse the truth conditions of the clause it appears in (Krifka 2010): (1) Ich gehe nicht nach Hause, bevor das (nicht) fertig ist. 'I won't go home before that is (not) finished.' — both variants truth-conditionally equivalent The talk pursues a semantic question: are...