Goethe-University Frankfurt Linguistics

Goethe-University Frankfurt Linguistics This page provides some information on current events of the Linguistics Department of Goethe-University Frankfurt.

Information on the Linguistics Department, Talks and Conferences at the Goethe-University Frankfurt

08/12/2025

Semantics Colloquium

Lisa Hofmann (Stuttgart):
"Negativity without negation: Counterfactual propositions and at-issueness"

Time: Thursday, December 11, 2025, 16 - 18
Place: IG 4.301

This work addresses the question of what are the levels of representations involved in representing the discourse-effect of negation, by investigating the anaphoric polarity-sensitivity of negativity-tags. Anaphoric negativity­-tags (neg-­tags) occur naturally after negative clausal antecedents, but not affirmative ones (1). These include: (2a) English neither­-tags, (2b) ‘not even’ tags (Klima 1964), and (2c) factive uses of elliptical ‘why not’ interrogatives (Hofmann 2022; Anand et al. 2021).

(1)
I think that the defense lawyer’s closing statement {didn’t make / # made} an impact in this case.

(2)
a. Yeah, and neither did the testimonies.
b. Yeah, not even on the public perception.
c. Yeah, and the jury foreperson explained why not.

The presentation investigates neg-­tag licensing, presenting evidence for a discourse-­level view of negativity. While prior accounts link neg­-tags to clausal negation (sentential negativity hypothesis, e.g., Klima 1964), I build on recent proposals that neg-­tags are sensitive to counterfactual propositional content in a discourse-­level representation (discourse negativity hypothesis, Krifka 2013; Hofmann 2023). In two experiments, I present evidence that an utterance is “negative” in discourse, when It introduces a propositional discourse referent that is false according to speaker intuitions, and (at least relatively) at-issue. The findings support a generalization on the level of discourse, that goes beyond clausal representations and allows for pragmatic enrichment.

25/11/2025

Semantics Colloquium

Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt):
"Intensional type logic: standard translation and non-standard interpretation"

Time: Thursday, November 27, 16 - 18
Place: IG 4.301

The compositional interpretation of natural language is often carried out indirectly, by translation into a suitable type logic. This talk concerns the formal properties of such languages. More specifically, it is about Montague’s intensional type logic (IL), which has long been known to be almost expressively equivalent with its two-sorted substratum (Ty2): Gallin’s standard translation from IL to Ty2 can be reversed so as to cover nearly all of the latter, excepting only terms that are themselves of non-intensional types or contain such parameters. However, the proof depended on the so-called standard interpretation of both languages, according to which abstraction and quantification range over full set-theoretic domains. The question of whether the result also holds for Gallin's restricted, axiomatisable non-standard interpretation had been open until recently. It now appears that there is more than one correct answer.

20/11/2024

Phonology Colloquium

Justine Mertz (Köln): "Investigating prosodic modulation in French Sign Language (LSF): A kinematic analysis of sign language coarticulation"

Time: Wednesday, November 20, 4pm - 6pm
Place: IGF 4.301

Abstract:
During interaction, speakers often modulate coarticulatory cues to either amplify or reduce perceptual distinctions between competing speech units. Anticipatory coarticulation has been observed in visual-gestural languages as well. However, coarticulatory strategies in sign language remain underexplored. This study offers the first investigation of coarticulation in French Sign Language (LSF) using 3D-Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) for precise kinematic analysis of sign production. A deaf native signer was recorded (EMA/video) producing phonological sign pairs involving '1'- and/or '3'-handshapes. The kinematic data reveal the presence of coarticulation in varied discourse contexts, at both temporal and spatial levels. Using a dynamical framework (Articulatory Phonology), we interpret these kinematic patterns as systematic overlapping processes rooted in the phonological system.

01/11/2024

Phonology Colloquium

Marieke Einfeldt (Konstanz):
"Differences of prenuclear accents and stops in the two varieties of Zurich German speakers: A within speaker comparison"

Time: Wednesday, November 6, 4pm - 6pm
Place: IGF 4.301

30/10/2024

Syntax Colloquium

Rebecca Jarvis (Berkely/Potsdam)
"Three paths to resumption in Atchan"

Time: Monday, November 4, 4 - 6
Place: IGF 4.301

In this talk, I document a three-way split in resumption morphology in Atchan (Kwa, Côte d’Ivoire). I show that the morphology of resumptive elements depends both on the kind of A’-dependency involved and the identity of the peripheral element: topics are resumed differently than other elements, and in some positions and dependencies pronouns are resumed differently than lexical DPs. The dependency type split, I argue, is best analyzed by assuming that topics are base-generated in the clausal periphery, while other dependencies involve movement (as is cross-linguistically familiar; cf. Cinque 1977, Aissen 1992, Georgi & Amaechi 2022). Meanwhile, the split between pronouns and lexical DPs emerges in movement-derived dependencies. I argue that the particularities of this second split favor a view on which two different mechanisms—both prominence requirements (Pesetsky 1998, Landau 2006) and cliticization (Nunes 2004, Harizanov 2014)—can derive resumption in movement dependencies.

30/10/2024

Psycholinguistics Colloquium

Florian Hintz (University of Marburg)
"Individual Differences in Language Skills"

Time: Thursday, November 7, 2 - 4
Place: IGF 4.301

Individual differences in language processing are prevalent in our daily lives. However, for decades, psycholinguistic research has largely ignored variation in the normal range of abilities. Recently, scientists have begun to acknowledge the importance of inter-individual variability for a comprehensive characterization of the language system. In spite of this change of attitude, empirical research on individual differences is still sparse, which is in part due to the lack of a suitable research tool. I will present a novel battery of behavioral tests for assessing individual differences in language skills in younger adults. The battery is currently available for Dutch and German; an English version is under development. I will first describe the structure of the battery and its theoretical foundations. I will then report on our efforts in norming the Dutch battery and zoom in on one application of the test data that addressed the role of domain-general processing speed in language production. I will close by giving a short demonstration of the web platform where scientists can create customized versions of the battery for their own research.

14/10/2024

NegLab Colloquium (SFB 1629)

Hagen Hirschmann (Berlin):
"Perspectives for the Corpus-Based Annotation and Analysis of Negation "

Time: Tuesday, October 15, 2 - 4
Place: online

The presentation will provide a methodical overview of how to address the linguistic phenomenon of negation in corpus linguistics.It aims to outline the possibilities (and, if necessary, the limitations) for annotating various aspects of negation (such as distinctions in lexis, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics) in a way that represents these linguistic features as accurately as possible.

The talk will take place online. To get access, please contact the Coordinator of the SFB at https://www.neglab.de/

16/01/2024

Semantics Colloquium

Nadine Bade (Potsdam):
"Linguistic Illusions Revisited: The Role of Maximal Informativity" (Joint work with Vera Hohaus and Ryan Walter Smith, The University of Manchester)

Time: Thursday, January 18, 16 - 18
Place: IG 4.301

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 taken to convey that all missiles should be banned, rather than legalised.

(1) No head injury is too trivial to be ignored.

# Ignore all head injuries!
Don’t ignore any head injuries!

(2) No missile is too small to be banned.

Ban all missiles!
# Don’t ban any missiles!

Building on the extent-based treatment of negative-polar antonyms in von Stechow (1984), the analysis of too in Meier (2003), and the discussion in Beck & Rullmann (1999), we propose a compositional analysis of depth-charge sentences and the difference between (1) and (2). The alleged illusion under this analysis derives from the interaction of maximal informativity with the monotonicity of the degree predicate that underlies the standard of the comparison.

16/01/2024

Historical Linguistics Colloquium

Ewa Trutkowski (ZAS Berlin):
"Zur Bildung gegenderter Neoformen im Deutschen" (in German)

Time: Tuesday, January 23, 14 - 16 (via Zoom)
Place: IG 2.301

Thema dieses Vortrags sind gegenderte Neoformen im nominalen, pronominalen und adjektivischen Bereich. Dabei geht es vorrangig um die Frage, nach welchen Regeln bzw. Mustern gegenderte Wortformen gebildet werden und wo - zwischen Flexion und Wortbildung - die jeweiligen Neoformen dann anzusiedeln sind.

08/01/2024

Phonology Colloquium

Candy Adusei (Stuttgart University):
"Relative Clause Attachment and Prosodic Phrasing in Akan Twi and English"

Time: Wednesday, January 10, 16 - 18
Place: IG 4.301

Ample research has been conducted on the intricacies of attachment preferences which are caused by ambiguity when the head noun of the relative clause to which it is attached is complex, exemplified in the sentence: The servant of the actress who shot the man is here. This has given rise to the high attachment (where the parser attaches the relative clause to the initial noun, ‘the servant’), versus the low attachment (where the relative clause is attached to the most recent noun, the actress’) debate. Different languages have been shown to prefer different attachments for various reasons. One of such theories which attempt to account for this variation is Fodor (2002)’s Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, which explains that attachment resolution is affected by the default prosodic phrasing of the sentences across languages, and thus in silent reading, the reader provides the words with intonation and creates prosodic boundaries which influence processing and hence, resolution. This thesis seeks to investigate whether these prosodic cues such as prominent rises, lengthening and pauses, found to influence processing of these complex sentence types (de la Cruz-Pavía & Elordieta, 2015) in some languages including German, English and Spanish (Hemforth et al., 2015), play a similar role in Akan Twi, a tonal language which is characterized by stacking of relative clauses creating attachment ambiguity. Two experiments are used to explore this: a sentence completion task to determine which attachment type is preferred by Akan Twi speakers, and a production task which seeks to explore cues that are attributive of high attachment and low attachment sentences. This research hypothesizes that parallel to English, which is the official language of Akan Twi speakers, when presented with a choice in the sentence completion task, low attachment will be implicitly preferred, which could be guided by new information received. Due to limited research on relative clause attachment in Akan Twi, prosodic cues that differentiate between the two attachment types pose an open question, howvever, it is expected that known cues such as pauses, pitch reset and lenghtening, will be found to interact in specific ways to signify this difference in production.

19/12/2023

Semantics Colloquium

Vinicius Macuch Silva (Birmingham):
"Talking numbers: Exploring the communication of quantity in English"

Time: Thursday, December 21, 16 - 18
Place: IG 4.301

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” and “shrinking shares” that express change in quantity). I discuss the findings of these studies against the backdrop of what it means to talk about quantity – that is, what dimensions one may wish to express in the first place – and what their implications for linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of quantity communication are. Ultimately, I conclude by arguing that our theories need to account for the intricacy of quantity expression as its found in actual language use, and that empirical work may shed light on what the limits of such natural variability might be and what factors constrain it.

08/12/2023

Phonology Colloquium

Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Saarbrücken):
"Information Density and Phonetic Variation"

Time: Wednesday, December 13, 16 - 18
Place: IG 4.301

In this talk I will take an information-theoretic perspective on
speech production and perception. I will explore the relation between
information density and phonetic encoding and decoding. Information
density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the
unit's negative log probability in a given context). The main
hypothesis underlying our experimental and modeling work is that
speakers modulate details of the phonetic encoding in the service of
maintaining a balance of the complementary relation between
information density and phonetic encoding.

To test this hypothesis we analyzed the effects of surprisal on
phonetic encoding, in particular on dynamic vowel formant
trajectories, stop consonant voicing, syllable duration, and vowel
space size, while controlling for several basic factors related to the
prosodic structure, viz. lexical stress and major prosodic boundaries,
in the statistical models that accounted for phonetic effects of
changes in surprisal (e.g. Malisz et al. 2018, Brandt et
al. 2021). Our findings are generally compatible with a weak version
of the Smooth Signal Redundancy (SSR) hypothesis (Aylett & Turk
2004, 2006, Turk 2010), suggesting that the prosodic structure
mediates between requirements of efficient communication and the
speech signal. However, this mediation is not perfect, as we found
evidence for additional, direct effects of changes in predictability
on the phonetic structure of utterances. These effects appear to be
stable across different speech rates in models fit to data derived
from six different European languages (Malisz et al. 2018).

Moreover, we investigated effects on subword (segmental and syllable)
levels and in local prosodic structures (at phrase boundaries), in
acoustically clean and in noisy conditions. Our recent findings
suggest that speakers make an effort to increase the difference
between syllables in high vs. low surprisal contexts in the presence
of noise. No interaction was found between noise and surprisal,
suggesting that noise-related modifications may be independent of
those induced by surprisal. If so, speech production models should
include channel-based as well as message-based formulations: although
channel coding is not part of linguistic representation (message
formulation) during speech planning, it does shape the phonetic
output. We also found evidence for syllable-level predictability
effects on temporal cues of voicing on the segmental level. The effect
is sensitive to the phonological relevance of language-specific
phonetic correlates of voicing. Finally, effects of predictability
were found to serve as a measure of language proficiency and
competence. Different proficiency levels are characterized by the
extent to which effects of predictability are implemented in L2
production.

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