Talks

We are happy to announce a talk by Maciej Kleczek. You can find the abstract below. Title: A Solution to Fine's Paradox of a Variable Room: IG 4.301 Date: November 14 Time: 4pm - 6pm A Solution to Fine's Paradox of a Variable In [2] Kit Fine formulated the paradox of a variable. Roughly, it isolates a conflict between two intuitions concerning the semantic role of a variable. According to the first intuition a semantic role of a variable is exhausted by the range of its values. Consequently, any two variables turn out to be synonymous. On the other hand, in the context of an expression (a formula and/or polynomial), it happens that distinct variables play a different semantic role. Hence, a contradiction. In the first part of the talk we zoom in the structure of Fine’s reasoning and abstract away from the Fine’s example. As the outcome, we extract tacit assumptions, which lead to the paradox. These assumptions are principle of compositionality and...

Dear all,   We are happy to announce the next talk in the phonology colloquium  - Abstract below:   13.11.19 Jason Bishop (CUNY): "Prosodic evidence for individual differences in speech production planning" Time: 16-18 PM Room: IG 4.301 Everybody is welcome! /frank Abstract: Evidence from a wide range of phonetic and phonological patterns suggests that speech production planning unfolds in relatively large chunks—chunks that are better defined in terms of phrase-level prosodic units (Keating & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2002) than in terms of one-or-two-word sequences (Levelt, et al., 1999). More recently, research in phonetics and psycholinguistics has begun to explore the extent to which planning might be flexible (Wagner et al., 2010; Krivokapić, 2012), that is, that planning scope is sensitive to both speaker-external (e.g. speaking conditions) and speaker-internal (e.g. cognitive limitations) factors. In this talk, I present data from a large-scale production study that bear on the role of a speaker-internal factor, namely working memory capacity (WMC). In particular, I argue that patterns of prosodic variation in these data are systematically related...

We are very happy to announce the next talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, November 11, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Roland Hinterhölzl (Venice) will talk about „A new approach to control and raising: From the Case-filter to the D-filter“. Abstract: I will present a novel approach to control and raising that is embedded in a predicative interpretation of Tense and a presuppositional approach to pronominal reference. Tense is shown, like nominal predicates, to be used referentially or attributively (Donellan 1966) and pronouns are argued to possess an abstract nominal predicate of the type participant (x,s). The distribution of PRO is shown to be determined by its basic property of lacking phi-feature. Thus, PRO lacks the presuppositional features that serve to identify its antecedent. Instead, PRO is identified via a binding relation of its situation argument – via Tense - to the matrix event and the s-selection of a C-head with a participant feature (+/-...

The next talk in the semantics colloquium will be by Jan Köpping. Please find an abstract below. Title: De re without movement. Cyclic semantic interpretation Room: IG 4.301 Date: November 7 Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: When it comes to the interpretation of certain expressions (e.g. definite descriptions) in intensional environments, one of their readings, namely their de re reading, is derived by lifting the expression in question into a position where it receives this interpretation naturally. E.g. "Peter believes that the president of Germany is on holidays" is (roughly) interpreted as "Peter believes about the president of Germany that he is on holidays." This kind of movement step is found in other areas of semantics theorizing as well, most prominently when it comes to account for the accessibility of discourse referents introduced by such expressions. In order for their discourse referents to end up in the right universe, the expressions are dislocated while their host-DRS is construed; thus, some comparable sort of movement step...

The next talk in the phonology colloquium will be by Marta Wierzba (Potsdam University) - Abstract below:   06.11.19 Marta Wierzba: "Focus projection: extending the empirical data base" Room: IG 4.301 Everybody is welcome!   In this talk, I present two experiments on focus projection in German. In transitive sentences, prosodic prominence on the object is compatible with interpreting a larger unit (VP, IP) as focused. Such a broad-focus interpretation is usually assumed to be less available when the subject or the verb is the most prominent element. In experiment 1, I use a new experimental paradigm to test whether this prosodic asymmetry carries over to sentences with wh-movement. In experiment 2, I investigate whether projection is also possible for a different information-structural category, namely contrastive topics (CTs), and to what extent CT projection follows the same pattern as focus projection....