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.
The interviews were recorded and are available on the conference web site. Continue reading Resource: Interviews with famous semanticists
Earlier this week the open access publisher Language Science Press published a complete collection of papers by Tilman Höhle, edited by Stefan Müller, Marga Reis and Frank Richter. Tilman Höhle wrote a significant number of highly influential papers on German grammar (and on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) from the early 80s until the beginning of the millenium. Among the topics covered are Continue reading Tilman Höhle’s Gesammelte Schriften
Many members of the English linguistics team of the IEAS will participate in two events in Paris at the end of March which will be integrated in a meeting of the network on “One-to-many Correspondences”:
The workshop on the first two day includes presentations by various Frankfurt participants in the “One-to-many” network:
The European Worshop on HPSG has been an (almost) annual event, alternating between Frankfurt/Main (2012 & 2015) and Paris (2014).
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!
It is with great sadness that we learned that Emmon Bach died on November 28.
The website http://emmonbach.info is a place for sharing memories and contains many pictures from the Emmon Fest in Frankfurt just a few months ago.
Emmon’s colleagues from SOAS have have posted a Tribute to Emmon Bach.
An obituary has been posted on the Language Log.
Jim Blevins created a website for the Emmonfest, which was celebrated a week ago here in Frankfurt. It includes the program of the event, a link to the text of Emmon Bach’s Friday morning talk, and links to photostreams. There is more to come in the near future.
As announced earlier, Goethe-University Frankfurt will host a symposium for Emmon Bach. The event is organized by Gert Webelhuth, Jim Blevins, and Joyce McDonough and will be held in Frankfurt on June 20-21 in IG-Farben Haus, Eisenhower Room.
This year, Emmon Bach turns 85 years old. To celebrate this occasion, Emmon the person, and his career and accomplishments as a linguist, a symposium will be held in his honor in the Eisenhower Room of Goethe-University Frankfurt. The Eisenhower Room was General Eisenhower’s office when he led the military government of Germany and is the most representative room of the University of Frankfurt.
Chuck Fillmore has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Chuck Fillmore (1929-2014) has been one of the most influential linguistists in the last 50 years. His work centers around syntax and lexical semantics. He is one of the founders of Construction Grammar and has developed the theoretical basis of frame semantics. Continue reading Chuck Fillmore honored by the ACL