Talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf)

We are happy to announce a talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Interpretation and placement of English -ly adverbials: a case for a new quantitative approach Date: October 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The interplay of position and interpretation of adverbials has received considerable attention over the last 20 years. But even for English, there is no clear consensus on which readings need to be distinguished, which orderings of adverbials are grammatical, and whether, in the case of -ly adverbials, the semantic analysis should be based on the semantics of the base form or not. The aim of my talk is to discuss the ways quantitative measures like collocations and distributional semantics can be leveraged to clarify this picture. After an overview of the problems, I will discuss three case studies illustrating three different approaches. The first case study shows that collocations of the base adjectives in attributive position annotated for the ontological category of the head allow a more finegrained look at the consistency of...
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Talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: On the theoretical and empirical challenges of multiple agreement with subjects and objects Date: October 24 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk will focus on languages in which a finite verb agrees with the subject (S) and object (O), and in which O-agreement is argued to be conducted by a head high in the syntactic structure, such as T/Infl. Of particular interest are the verbal morphological templates in which O-agreement is realised by affixes closer to the verbal stem than S-affixes (Hungarian, Trommer 2003, E Kiss 2019; Tundra Nenets, Nikolaeva 2014; Khanty, Mansi, Mordvin, E Kiss 2019, Quechuan, Myler 2017, Nez Perce Deal 2017). Under Mirror Principle, this indicates that O-agreement applies before S-agreement, which is problematic for the standard Minimalist view of agreement, under which the subject should act as an intervener. The puzzle will...
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Workshop on Word Order in the Nominal Domain (WONDo), November 10-11, 2022

The doctoral researchers of RTG ’Nominal Modification' are organising a two-day Workshop on Word Order in the Nominal Domain (WONDo): Factors, Perspectives & Approaches. The workshop will take place between November 10-11, 2022 on Campus Westend (Cas 1.811) of Goethe University (https://sites.google.com/view/wondo2022/homepage). The workshop will host talks both by doctoral researchers, GK alumni and invited speakers. Participation is free of costs but please make sure to register here by October 31, 2022: https://sites.google.com/view/wondo2022/registration. Keep an eye on the homepage for the program. WONDo_2022_description...
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Guest Professor Seunghun J. Lee (Christian University, Tokyo) in July 2022

We welcome Seunghun J. Lee (Christian University, Tokyo) as this year's guest professor We are happy to welcome our guest Prof. Dr. Seunghun J. Lee from Christian University, Tokyo (https://sites.google.com/info.icu.ac.jp/linglab/home), who will be a guest researcher and lecturer at the Department of Linguistics in July 2022 as part of the International Campus Programme  (https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/56181581/International_Campus).    In the MA Programme "Linguistics", he will teach a course on "Prosody-Syntax-Interface: Theoretical and practical applications" - and everybody is welcome to participate. Registration for the course is via Olat. Here is the link to his class. https://qis.server.uni-frankfurt.de/qisserver/rds?state=verpublish&status=init&vmfile=no&publishid=334409&moduleCall=webInfo&publishConfFile=webInfo&publishSubDir=veranstaltung   Seunghun will be here the whole month of July. He is more than happy to discuss linguistic issues with colleagues and students. If anybody is interested in meeting him, just send him an email to s.lee@em.uni-frankfurt.de He can be reached in person in office IG 4.315....
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Talk by Julien Foglietti (Frankfurt)

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...
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