Language musea

Recently, the plans for a Museum of Linguistics have been widely spread through the (social) media. In winter 2019, Planet World has been announced to open as the first interactive museum on language in the USA.

There are already a number of similar musea, maybe you will have the opportunity to visit one of them in the near future. Please drop a comment, if you know of other such places or if you would like to report on your visit in one of them!

Semantic Fiction

The murder of Richard Montague, disruptive innovator in the thriving field of formal semantics (as he might be called by advertising companies today), is an unsolved police case. His theories of natural language, and their many successors, are of course still taught today, as any student in our semantics courses can tell you. For taking some time off from the intellectual effort that it takes to come to grips with logical languages, without leaving the topic altogether, there is an exciting option: A few years ago, Aifric Campbell published a murder mystery, The Semantics of Murder, which is constructed around the real-world events surrounding the life of Richard Montague. Here’s your exceptional chance to enjoy a structural analysis of a higher-order quantificational formula in a relaxing environment – as a student of semantics you might want to check out page 58 of the 2008 softcover edition right away!

Links

Sailer talks at “The Syntax of Idioms”, Utrecht, 20.1.2017

Manfred Sailer gave a talk at the one-day workshop on “The Syntax of Idioms”, organized by the Leuven & Utrecht project of the same name.  In the morning, project members presented their results and the database of idioms in Dutch dialects. In the afternoon, there were invited talks by Julia Horváth (Tel Aviv) on “Idioms and ‘Constructions’: Implications for the architecture of grammar”, Martin Everaert (Utrecht) on “Idioms: what you see is what you get?”, and Manfred on “The meaning of `meaningless’ idiom parts”.

Utrecht, January 2017. (Photo: M. Sailer, BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Manfred’s talk was based on joint work with Sascha Bargman on how to model the syntactic flexibility of non-decomposable idioms such as kick the bucket `die´.

Continue reading Sailer talks at “The Syntax of Idioms”, Utrecht, 20.1.2017