This week Frank is visiting Gerald Penn at the University of Toronto in Canada on a grant from the International Office. We are investigating possibilities to establish a collaboration on research questions that are of interest to the computational linguistics group in Toronto and to the linguists at the IEAS.
Manfred Sailer will give a talk on Inverse Linking and Telescoping as Polyadic Quantification (download the abstract) at Sinn und Bedeutung 19, September 15-17, 2014, in Göttingen.
The IEAS will host a workshop on multi-word expressions on September 8th and September 9th. The workshop is a gathering of the European PARSEME (PARSing and Multi-word Expressions) network in which multi-word expressions are investigated in an interdisciplinary setting.
Frank Richter will act as local organizer of the 19th conference on Formal Grammar, which will take place at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen on the weekend of August 16th and August 17th. The Standing Committee is particularly excited about the high registration numbers by students attending ESSLLI in the weeks before and after Formal Grammar. Invited speakers this year are Christian Retoré and Thomas F. Icard. The full program can be found at the official website of Formal Grammar 2014.
In a recent paper, Jennifer Spenader, Frank Richter and Janina Radó extend previous experimental work by Frank and Janina on negative polarity items in German to parallel data in English. In two experiments they investigated the ability of native speakers to distinguish different groups of NPIs:
J. Spenader, F. Richter & J. Radó (2014): Experimental Investigations of Licensing Environments for NPIs in English. In: Jack Hoeksema & Dicky Gilbers (eds.): Black Book. A Festschrift in Honor of Frans Zwarts. University of Groningen, pp. 301-310
The following job ad for either 1 postdoc or 2 doctoral positions has appeared on linguistlist.
Description:
The Linguistics section in the Department of English and American Studies (part of the College of Modern Philologies) of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) has an opening for either one full postdoctoral or two halftime Ph.D. positions as Wissenschafterliche/r Mitarbeiter/in (E13 TV-G-U). The position(s) start(s) on September 1, 2014 and is/are initially restricted to a duration of 3 years.
Assif Am-David published a monograph based on his dissertation “A semantic typology of definiteness”. This book explores the crosslinguistic distributional patterns of definiteness markers. A distinction is drawn between semantic definiteness and morpho-syntactic definiteness marking. The semantic components of definiteness are arranged, similar to semantic maps, and language-specifically assigned to definiteness markers. This model is based on the results of an empirical study of Q’ekchi’, Otomi, Maori and Basque. The choice of a suitable sample for a typological study is also discussed.
Bibliographic information:
Am-David, Assif (2014): A Semantic Typology of Definiteness. Lampert Academic Publishing.