Events

Program published. Workshop on “The Semantics and Pragmatics of Conditional Connectives” (virtually at DGfS 2021)

The program of the workshop “AG9: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Conditional Connectives”, which will be held virtually on February 24-26, 2021, at the 43th Annual conference of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS) hosted by the University of Freiburg, is online now. The workshop is organized by Mingya Liu and Mathias Barthel from XPrag.de project SPOCC, Humboldt University of Berlin.

Registration is now open.

More details of the workshop can be found here.

Program published. Workshop on “The Processing of Negation and Polarity” to be held mostly virtually, October 1-2, 2020

The program of the workshop “The Processing of Negation and Polarity” to be held mostly virtually, October 1-2, 2020 is online now. The workshop is organized by Carolin Dudschig (University of Tübingen, MoLCINS), Barbara Kaup (University of Tübingen, MoLCINS), Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin, SPOCC) and Juliane Schwab (Osnabrück University).

The workshop will take place online over ZOOM as well as, partially, on site (only for travellers within Germany). Please register for the conference by Sept. 25, 2020 to mingya.liu@hu-berlin.de with your full names, affiliations and email addresses if you are interested in attending the conference online or onsite.

More details and the programm can be found here.

XPrag.de at virtual Sinn und Bedeutung 25

There are several contributions by XPrag.de members at the Sinn und Bedeutung 25 co-hosted virtually by University College London (UCL) and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) on September 1st – 9th, 2020.

At the special session on ‘Gestures and Natural Language Semantics’ to take place on September 1st and 2nd 2020, Cornelia Ebert from project PSIMS in Frankfurt talks together with Andreas Konietzko (Tübingen) and Thomas Weskott (Göttingen) on “Recovering Gestured and Spoken Material in VP Ellipsis and Pro-forms“.

At the main session to take place September 3rd – 9th 2020, there will be five further talks:

Call for submissions to “The Semantics and Pragmatics of Conditional Connectives” February 24-26, 2021 in Freiburg, Germany

On February 24th to 26th, 2021 the workshop “The Semantics and Pragmatics of Conditional Connectives” will take place as part of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS) at the University of Freiburg, Germany. The workshop is organized by Mingya Liu & Mathias Barthel from project SPOCC, HU Berlin.

Logical connectives and operators in natural language have been a key empirical domain of study in theoretical and psycholinguistics. However, Conditional Connectives are quite understudied, especially in comparison to the well-studied negation, disjunction and quantifiers. The workshop aims to bring together current studies that address the distribution, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of CCs in relation to narrow linguistic or broad pragmatic contexts across languages, as well as studies on conditionals in general. We welcome contributions using different (e.g., formal semantic/pragmatic, diachronic, experimental, corpus-linguistic) methods. Deadline for submissions is September 15th, 2020. More details and the call for papers can be found here!

Deadline extended to June 30th! Workshop “The Processing of Negation and Polarity” at Humboldt University Berlin in October

On October 1st to 2nd, 2020, the workshop “The Processing of Negation and Polarity” will take place at Humboldt University Berlin. The workshop is organized by Carolin Dudschig (University of Tübingen, MoLCINS), Barbara Kaup (University of Tübingen, MoLCINS), Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin, SPOCC) and Juliane Schwab (Osnabrück University).

New deadline for submissions is June 30th, 2020.

The workshop aims at establishing a broad perspective on the processing of negation and polarity, with a focus on (but not limited to) the following topics:
• One- versus two-step models of language comprehension through investigations employing negative sentences
• Experimental approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of canonical and noncanonical negation (negative concord, pleonastic negation)
• Processing of entailment cancelling contexts (negation, modals, questions, conditionals)
• Negative and positive polarity items
• Experimental computational/developmental/sociolinguistic approaches to negation and polarity

More details and the call for papers can be found here.

XPrag.de at virtual CUNY 2020

Several XPrag.de members presented their research at the 33rd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, which took place at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from March 19th-21st 2020 virtually.

XPrag.de associate Florian Schwarz (UPenn) gave a talk on “Reflections on (some of) the roles of linguistic theory in psycholinguistics: Case studies in presupposition projection” in the session Friday, Session 5, chaired by XPrag.de Mercator Fellow Jesse Snedeker. It is worthwhile to watch the recorded session.

In addition, there were many poster presentations by XPrag.de members. Some posters can be found at https://osf.io/meetings/cuny2020/.

  • “Investigating the grammatical SNARC effect for collective nouns” by Fabian Hurler (MoLCINS, Tübingen), Nikole Patson, Tessa Warren and Barbara Kaup (MoLCINS, Tübingen).
  • “Lexical and contextual cue effects in discourse expectations: experimenting with German zwar…aber vs. English sure…but” by Juliane Schwab and Mingya Liu (SPOCC, HU Berlin)
  • “Exhaustivity of questions embedded under know, predict, agree and surprise” by Lea Fricke and Edgar Onea (both ExQ, Graz)
  • “Is sonderlich losing its NPI-status?” by Juliane Schwab, Mingya Liu (SPOCC, HU Berlin) and Jutta Mueller
  • “Order, relevance and script knowledge: Revising temporal structures” by Maria Spychalska (ImpliPer, Cologne)
  • “New data on the nature of competition between indefinites and definites” by Nadine Bade (ObTrEx, Tübingen) and Florian Schwarz
  • “Processing implicatures: a comparison between direct and indirect SIs” by Paul Marty, Romoli Jacopo, Yasutada Sudo, Bob van Tiel (MUQTASP, ZAS Berlin) and Richard Breheny
  • Every Horse didn’t Jump over the Fence: Scope Ambiguity via Pragmatic Reasoning” by Sherry Yong Chen (former XPrag.de Intern) and Bob van Tiel (MUQTASP)
  • “Binding options of German demonstrative pronouns: a large-sample study and a computational model” by Umesh Patil and Stefan Hinterwimmer (XPrag.de associate, Cologne)

XPrag.de at the 43rd Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) virtual conference

Several XPrag.de members will present their research at the 43rd Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) conference, which will take place (virtually) at Humboldt University Berlin from April 8th to 20th, 2020.

Attendance is free of charge. Please find further information about how to attend virtually here: https://glowlinguistics.org/43/going-virtual/attending/.

There will be two contributions by XPrag.de members at the main colloquium. Cornelia Loos and Sophie Repp from project YesNo2 in Cologne will present a poster together with former XPrag.de member Markus Steinbach (University of Göttingen) on “Responding to positive and negative assertions in German Sign Language (DGS)”. Furthermore, XPrag.de associate Andreea Nicolae (ZAS Berlin) will present a poster on “The polarity of additive particles”.

XPrag.de member Nicole Gotzner (SIGames, ZAS Berlin) will give a talk on “The dual function of L+H* pitch accents” at the “Workshop I: Prosody in Speech Signal, Perception and Gestures”

Furthermore, XPrag.de coordinator Uli Sauerland organizes together with Wataru Uegaki (University of Edinburgh) the “Workshop II: Semantic Universals in the Modal and Attitudinal Domain”

There are time slots to interact with presenters. Please check the conference program.

Call for submissions to “QUDs and exhaustivity: experiments, computation, and theory”, September 25-26th, 2020 in Graz, Austria

On September 25th to 26th, 2020 the workshop “QUDs and exhaustivity: experiments, computation, and theory” will take place at the University of Graz, Austria. The workshop is organized by Anton Benz (ZAS Berlin, SIGames) and Edgar Onea (Graz, ExQ).

In the workshop the organizers wish to bring together pragmatic and grammatical approaches to exhaustivity inferences associated with different constructions: scalar implicatures, clefts, focus constructions, embedded questions, presuppositions, discourse relations etc. Thereby, they assume that the relevance of a set of alternatives and the QUD may be a link between different types of approaches that needs further exploration. Deadline for submissions is July 15th, 2020. More details and the call for papers can be found here!

XPrag.de at the workshop “Degree Expressions and Polarity Effects”

There will be several contributions by XPrag.de members at the workshop “Degree Expressions and Polarity Effects” to be held at ZAS Berlin from March 9th-10th, 2020. The workshop is organized by XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt (DegAtt,ZAS) and Cameron Wilson (ZAS).

On Monday, March 9th, at 12pm, there will be a talk by Eri Tanaka, Kenta Mizutani and Stephanie Solt on “Equative semantics and polarity sensitivity”.

At the poster session in the afternoon (4:40-6:20), XPrag.de associates Andreea Nicolae and Kazuko Yatsushiro will present a poster on “Eating kein veggies: negative concord in child German”. E. Cameron Wilson and Stephanie Solt will present a poster on “M-­degree modifiers and polar sensitivity”

On Tuesday, March 10th, at 10:50am, Nicole Gotzner from project SiGames will give a talk together with Diana Mazzarella (Neuchatel) on “The interpretation of negated adjectives: Dissociating polarity from face-­‐threatening potential”. At 11:30am, Bob van Tiel from project MUQTASP together with Elizabeth Pankratz, XPrag.de associate Chao Sun and Paul Marty will talk on “Polarity in scalar inference processing”. At 1:40pm, Shun Ihara, Stephanie Solt, Kenta Mizutani will talk on “Licensing of Minimizer PPIs under Negation”. And, at 2:20pm, XPrag.de Prinicipal Investigator Mingya Liu (SPOCC, HU Berlin) will give a talk together with Juliane Schwab and Jutta Mueller (both Osnabrück) on “Is sonderlich losing its NPI-­‐status?”

XPrag.de at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the DGfS in Hamburg

There will be several contributions by XPrag.de members at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) to be held at the University of Hamburg from March 4th-6th, 2020.

Nicole Gotzner from project SiGames, ZAS Berlin, organizes together with Bob van Tiel (MUQTASP, ZAS Berlin), Anton Benz (SiGames, ZAS Berlin) and XPrag.de Mercator Fellow Napoleon Katsos (University of Cambridge) the workshop “AG 13: Diversity in pragmatic inferences: experimental data, computational models, and the semantics/pragmatics interface“.

On Thursday, March 5th at 2:15 pm, XPrag.de associate Richard Breheny (University College London) will give a talk together with XPrag.de associate Chao Sun (Humboldt University of Berlin), Nicole Gotzner and Anton Benz on “Diverse mechanisms explain Scalar Diversity”.

On Friday, March 6th at the poster session (1:15-2:15, Foyer ESA 1 Flügel West), Lea Fricke (ExQ, Graz University), Dominique Blok (ExQ, University of Potsdam) and Malte Zimmermann (ExQ, University of Potsdam) will present a poster on “The pragmatic status of strong exhaustive readings of embedded questions”.