Paris in March – Short report

From March 23 to March 29, members of the Frankfurt HPSG community traveled to Paris as part of a co-operation with colleagues from the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle – see the previous post in this blog.

Invader at Paris Diderot (Photo: M. Sailer, March 2017, BY-NC-ND 3.0)

March 24 and 25, the 4th European Workshop on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (EW-HPSG) took place. It featured 15 talks, including topics on morphology, syntax, and semantics. The workshop included the following presentations from the Frankfurt group:

  • Andy Lücking: Can co-verbal gestures tell us something about semantic structures? Plurals and complex reference objects. Andy argues that co-verbal gestures accompanying plural nouns can be used as arguments that plural noun phrases make available a range of different discourse referents. He proposes a formalization of this idea in Minimal Recursion Semantics.
  • Frank Richter & David Lahm: Every linguist proposed a different account. Frank and David both have indepently worked on the semantics of different. In their talk, they compared their accounts, focussing on differences in the formalization and on differences in the type of phenomena considered.
  • Manfred Sailer: The multi-dimensional semantics of kinegrams. Manfred presented a somewhat more formal version of his ideas on kinegrams such as prick one’e ears or shake one’s head, which he had presented at the workshop Recent trends in figurative language research

The next edition of the EW-HPSG is planned for May 2018 in Frankfurt a.M.

March 27, we had the chance to attend the colloquium on Constraint-based Syntax and Semantics in Honor of Danièle Godard. The day was rich in contributions on topics that related to work of Danièle.

The rest of the stay of the Frankfurt group was devoted to cooperating on one-to-many correspondences in morphology, syntax, and semantics.