TALK BY NELE OTS – WEDNESDAY 5TH 4-6PM

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the phonology colloquium by Nele Ots, which was cancelled last year - Abstract below:   05.02.2020 Nele Ots (GU): "Conceptual and linguistic influences on sentence intonation: evidence from English and Estonian languages" Time: 16-18 Room: IG 4.301   Everybody is welcome!   Abstract: The study investigates how early phrasal F0 is planned in experimentally controlled but spontaneous utterances. Phonetic evidence indicates speakers preplan F0 declination (e.g., Yuan and Liberman, 2014). The phonetic F0 data was combined with eye movements to explore how well F0 of phrase-initial energy peaks (also F0 declination) relates to conceptual and phonological levels of planning in two typologically different languages - English and Estonian. Speakers described pictures of simple events with sentences of varying length (e.g., The girl is hanging the pink shirt/ the shirt with ladybirds vs. The girl is hanging a shirt). Importantly, the results showed that speech onset delays and F0 peaks were both affected by the length of the last-mentioned noun phrases (patient...
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Talk by Frank Sode – Thursday 6th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (Goethe Universität). Please find an abstract below. Title: The syntax and semantics of suppletive "wenn"-clauses: Evidence from V2 Room: IG 4.301 Date: February 6th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: As Williams (1974) observed, the sentence in (1-a) can have a reading that can be paraphrased as in (1-b). (1) a. I would be happy if Bill were here.      b. I would be happy that Bill was here, if he were. Pesetsky (1991) argues that Williams' paraphrase is "more than a mere paraphrase". According to Pesetsky (1991), something like (1-b) is an actual syntactic representation of (1-a) at some level of the derivation. It is well-known that V2-clauses in German can alternate with suppletive "wenn"-clauses in construction with preference predicates, see for example Frank (1998), Meinunger (2004), Meinunger (2007). (2) a. Es ist besser, wenn du kommst.           It is better if you come       b. Es ist besser, du kommst.           It is better you come       Both: 'It is...
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Talk by Roland Hinterhölzl – Thursday 30th 4-6pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Roland Hinterhölzl  (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below. Title: A situation-based approach to (pro)nominal reference Room: IG 4.301 Date: January 30th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: I will argue that nominal expressions relate an individual and a situation. In particular, I will discuss the interpretation of weak, strong and anaphoric or referential DPs and argue that the interpretation of their situation argument crucially depends on the presuppositions imposed by their determiner, with the default being (in the absence of a presupposition) that the situation argument is identified with the event denoted by the verb. ...
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