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
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.
Frank Richter was invited for a talk at Laura Kallmeyer’s computational linguistics group at Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf on January 30, 2020. Frank’s presentation on Idiom Modification, based on work with Berit Gehrke and Sascha Bargmann, was investigating corpus data with a particular kind of modified idiom which displays its usual idiomatic reading but also a literal interpretation of that part of it that is targeted by modification. A classical example of this kind of construction is Ernst’s (1981) In spite of the treatment the other refugees received from the rescue party in the desert, he bit his thirst-swollen tongue and kept to himself. Here the modifier thirst-swollen does not belong to the idiomatic expression in which it is embedded (to bite one’s tongue), and it triggers a literal interpretation of the noun tongue, which at the same time belongs to the idiomatic expression. Ernst called these peculiar cases of idiom modification conjunction modification. Corpus studies reveal that the phenomenon is more widespread than one might expect, and the data are clearly a lot of fun.
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.
In der Arbeitsgruppe „Syntax-Semantik-Schnittstelle“ (Sailer) der Englischen Sprachwissenschaft ist zum 1.4.2020 eine studentische Hilfskraftstellen zu besetzen.
20 Stunden im Monat, 1.4.2020-30.9.2020
Die gesuchte Hilfskraft soll die Arbeitsgruppe technisch und inhaltlich unterstützen. Das beinhaltet Scan-Aufträge, Computerbetreuung (Mac), Unterstützung bei LaTex-Projekten, Aktualisierung des Internetauftritts (www.english-linguistics.de), Continue reading Studentische Hilfskraft gesucht!→
KU Eichstätt, January 2020 (Photo: M. Sailer, BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Manfred Sailer was invited to give a talk at the department of English Linguistics of the Katholische Universität Eichstätt on January 20, 2020. Manfred’s talk on “Words and idioms: Holistic and analytic aspects of idiom Continue reading Sailer in Eichstätt→
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