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
2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL). World-wide, many initiatives use this occasion to raise awareness for indigenous langauges, their importance, the threats that they are facing, and their chances. Continue reading International Year of Indigenous Languages: Events at the IEAS
The Survey of English Usage project of University College London has been creating resources for teaching English. The web site englicious.org is of particular interest for future teachers of English. It is freely accessible and contains material to explain and practice English grammar, based on the UK National Curriculum of 2014. Continue reading englicious: Material for teaching English grammar
The proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22 have just been published and are freely accessible for download from the semantics archive. The proceedings contain a joint contribution of the projects NRR and CON of Research Unit 1783 Relative Clauses.
In their contribution on “Split antecedent relative clauses and the symmetry of predicates”, Claudia Poschmann, Sascha Bargmann, Christopher Götze, Anke Holler, Manfred Sailer, Gert Webelhuth, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann present the results of Continue reading Paper published: Split-antecedent relative clauses
Earlier this week, Language Science Press has published the following edited volume:
Sailer, Manfred & Stella Markanotantou. 2018. Multiword expressions: Insights from a multi-lingual perspective (Phraseology and Multiword Expressions, Vol 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. doi 10.5281/zenodo.1182583
The book is one of the results of the COST Action 1207 Parseme: Parsing and Multiword Expressions (2013-2017).
The book is summarized on the web page as follows: Continue reading New book: “Multiword expressions: Insights from a multi-lingual perspective”
Ever wondered about grammatical frameworks other than HPSG and Minimalism? Miriam Butt (Konstanz) recorded an introductory course on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG).
Miriam’s course can be access through the following links:
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/butt/main/Teaching.html#lfg-ma Continue reading Online material for learning LFG
Today is International Mother Language Day!
A great opportunity to celebrate linguistic diversity, to support projects to explore and protect endangered languages, to find out about language minorities and linguistic diversity in your own country!
Here is a list of holidays and special dates with relation to language and linguistics. This list will hopefully expand in the near future and we will add more information to the indicated events. Continue reading Linguistic calendar
Recently, the plans for a Museum of Linguistics have been widely spread through the (social) media. In winter 2019, Planet World has been announced to open as the first interactive museum on language in the USA.
There are already a number of similar musea, maybe you will have the opportunity to visit one of them in the near future. Please drop a comment, if you know of other such places or if you would like to report on your visit in one of them!
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!
Manfred Sailer gave a talk at the one-day workshop on “The Syntax of Idioms”, organized by the Leuven & Utrecht project of the same name. In the morning, project members presented their results and the database of idioms in Dutch dialects. In the afternoon, there were invited talks by Julia Horváth (Tel Aviv) on “Idioms and ‘Constructions’: Implications for the architecture of grammar”, Martin Everaert (Utrecht) on “Idioms: what you see is what you get?”, and Manfred on “The meaning of `meaningless’ idiom parts”.
Manfred’s talk was based on joint work with Sascha Bargman on how to model the syntactic flexibility of non-decomposable idioms such as kick the bucket `die´.
Continue reading Sailer talks at “The Syntax of Idioms”, Utrecht, 20.1.2017