Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Lennart Fritzsche (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: January 25, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Ja or Jaaaaa? How Prosodic Modulations Influence the Scalar Interpretation of Adjectives Abstract: The traditional view that language is arbitrary (Hockett, 1960) has become increasingly challenged recently (e.g., Blasi et al., 2016): Iconic mappings between form and meaning are found throughout language, as for example in prosodic modulations of length such as looooong (Fuchs et al., 2019).  In German, it is possible to modulate the length of response particles in responses to polar questions containing a gradable adjective, cf. (1).  (1)   A: Findest du Berlin schön? (‘Do you find Berlin pretty?’)        B: Jaaaaa. (Lengthened German Ja ‘Yes’)  Empirical work on whether these instances of particle lengthening are iconic is lacking. The data presented in this work suggests...

We are happy to announce a talk by Nadine Bade (Potsdam) 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: January 18, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Linguistic Illusions Revisited: The Role of Maximal Informativity (Joint work with Vera Hohaus and Ryan Walter Smith, The University of Manchester) Abstract: Sentences like (1) have featured prominently in the psycholinguistics literature since Watson & Reich (1979) and are generally construed to mean that, regardless of their severity, all head injuries must receive medical attention (see also Sanford & Garrod 1998). A large body of literature has taken this interpretation, while robustly available, to be an illusion that obscures the literal interpretation of the sentence, under which all head injuries can be ignored (see also Higginbotham 1988 and Zimmermann & Sternefeld 2013). Evidence for such a view comes from the structurally parallel case in (2), which is...

We are happy to announce a talk by Vinicius Macuch Silva (Birmingham) 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: December 21, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Talking numbers: Exploring the communication of quantity in English Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the communication of quantity. I will start by contextualizing quantity and its expression through language. Following this, I will present three empirical studies focused on quantity communication in English: two experimental psycholinguistic studies and one corpus-based one. The first study deals with multimodal quantifier interpretation (i.e., how the interpretation of several is modulated by gesture), the second one with the production of quantifiers in argumentative scenarios (i.e., how people use quantifiers such as some and most to make quantities appear large or small), and the third one with the usage of change-of-state verbs (e.g. expressions such as “rising prices”...