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.
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.
