Manfred Sailer
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien (Section English Linguistics)
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Grüneburgplatz 1
D-60629 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Homepage: http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~sailer/
Tel.: +49 - (0)69 - 798 32526
Fax: +49 - (0)69 - 798 32509
E-Mail: sailer "at" em "dot" uni-frankfurt "dot" de
Shene Othman Hassan submitted her thesis on Syntactic and semantic aspects of supplementary relative clauses in English and Sorānī Kurdish and defended it December 18. Congratulations!
Shene looks at two understudied types of supplementary (i.e. non-restrictive) relative clause in English: those introduced by determiner-which, see (1), and those introduced by that, as in (2).
(1) Maybe people will attack me, in which case I will attack back. (COCA)
The 13th volume of Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics contains Manfred Sailer’s paper on Attributive “wrong” in underspecified semantics. The paper is based on Manfred’s talk at CSSP 2019. Manfred argues that there are two non-local readings of attributive wrong, illustrated in (1) and (2).
(1) The police arrested the wrong person.
‘The person that the police arrested is not (among) the person(s) that the police should have arrested.’
(2) Bluebeard’s wife opened the wrong door.
‘The door that Bluebeard’s wife should not open is among the doors that Bluebeard’s wife opened.’ Continue reading Sailer on attributive “wrong”→
Monica-Mihaela Rizea’s and Manfred’s research on negative polarity items (NPI) has just appeared in a special issue of Linguisticae Investigationes on Interfaces in Romance: A constraint-based approach (edited by Gabriela Bîlbîie):
Rizea, Monica-Mihaela & Manfred Sailer. 2020. A constraint-based modeling of negative polarity items in result clause constructions in Romanian. Linguisticae Investigationes 43(1). 129–168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00042.riz
This year’s Sinn und Bedeutung conference featured a special session on the History of Formal Semantics.
This section consisted of interviews with four famous linguists who were influential in the development of formal semantics: Hans Kamp, Barbara Partee, Martin Stokhof, and Angelika Kratzer.
Dr. Janina Radó is offering a colloquium for exam preparation during the summer semester 2020. There is an olat course to this colloquium. Please write to Manfred Sailer (sailer@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to get access to this course.
The 4th student conference on “REsearch in English Linguistics” (REEL-Day) took place February 15 at Goethe Univesity. It is a continuation of a teaching cooperation between the Department of English Linguistics, Mainz, and IEAS/Linguistics, Frankfurt, which started last year. This year, Ulrike Schneider (Mainz) and Manfred Sailer (Frankfurt) taught parallel project-oriented courses on the overreaching topic of Language in Politics.