On March 27-28th, 2019 the workshop “The meaning of numerals: cognitive, experimental, and semantic perspectives” will take place at ZAS Berlin. The workshop is organized by Anton Benz (SiGames, ZAS), Christoph Hesse (SiGames/BAPAGiD, ZAS), Stephanie Solt (ZAS) and Paul Egre (CNRS, Paris). Deadline for submissions is January 7th, 2019. More details and the call for papers can be found here!

There will be two contributions by XPrag.de members at the 44th Generative Grammatik des Südens (GGS) 2018 conference to be held at Potsdam University, October 4th to 5th.

On October 4th, at 11:45am, Lea Fricke, Carla Bombi, Malte Zimmermann and Edgar Onea (all project “ExQ”) will give a talk on Exhaustivity in German embedded questions: Experimental evidence. In the afternoon, at 2:15 pm, XPrag.de coordinator Uli Sauerland will give a talk with the title The Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis.

There will be many presentations by XPrag.de members at the workshop on Computational Models of Language Generation and Processing in Pragmatics, to be held at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, September 26th-28th, 2018.

On September 26th, at 11:10 a.m., Markus Werning from project BayesPrag@EEG will talk on Contextual modulation of telic and agentive components in the lexicon of nouns, followed by Sebastian Schuster and Judith Degen (project Pro^3), who will talk on Listener adaptation to variable use of uncertainty expressions. At 12:50 p.m. Michael Franke (also from project Pro^3) will talk on Rational predictive pragmatic processing. At 15:10 p.m. Anton Benz (project SiGames) will give a talk with the title Producing implicature of complex sentences, followed by Maria Spychalska (project ImplPer), who will talk on Temporal order, short-term memory and the processing of conjunctive sentences. At 16:50 p.m., Nicole Gotzner will talk on The role of prosody in pragmatic processing.

On September 27th, at 15:10 p.m. Christoph Hesse (SiGames) will talk on Giving the wrong impression, followed by Maria Spychalska, Viviana Haase, J. Kontinen, and Markus Werning, who will talk on Negation, prediction and truth-value judgments.

There will be several presentations by XPrag.de members at the AMLaP 2018 Conference to be held in Berlin, September 6-8. The conference is organized by XPrag.de member Pia Knoeferle (project FoTeRo)

On September 7th, XPrag.de coordinator Petra Schumacher (project InfoPer) will give a talk together with J. Knowles, A. Krott, and S. Frissonon on Processing Of Ad Hoc Metonymy.
In addition there will be several poster presentations. Mingya Liu (project SPOCC) will present a poster together with M. Xiang on Anti-Locality Effect Without Verb – Final Dependecies. Susanne Fuchs (project PSIMS) will present a poster together with Marzena Żygis and Kasia Stoltmann on Orofacial Expressions And Acoustic Cues In Whispered And Normal Speech. Oliver Bott (project CiC) will present a poster together with XPrag.de associate Torgrim Solstad and A. Pryslopska on Implicit Causality Affects the Choice of Anaphoric Form. Christoph Hesse and Anton Benz (project SiGames) will present a poster on Two mechanisms of scalar implicature in comparatively modified numerals.

There are many contributions by XPrag.de members at Sinn und Bedeutung 23 (SuB 23) to be held at the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, September 5-7, 2018.

On September 5, at 12:30 p.m. Carla Bombi from project ExQ in Potsdam will give a talk together with Mira Grubic, Agata Renans and Reggie Duah. The title of the talk is The semantics of the clausal determiner “no” in Akan (Kwa). At the afternoon, at 14:15 p.m., former XPrag.de intern Alexander Göbel will talk on Final Appositives at the Right Frontier: An Experimental Investigation of Anaphoric Potential.
On September 6, at 4:30 p.m. there will be a talk by Kazuko Yatsushiro, Ayaka Sugawara and Uli Sauerland on Effect of intonation contour on scope: evidence from Language Acquisition
On September 7, at 11:45 a.m. XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt (ZAS Berlin) will talk on Not much: on the variable polarity sensitivity of ‘much’ words cross-linguistically, followed by a talk by Sophie Repp and Marlijn Meijer from project YesNo together with Nathalie Scherf on Responding to negative assertions in Germanic: On ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in English, Dutch and Swedish. At the same time there will be a talk by Erlinde Meertens, Sophie Egger and Maribel Romero (project BiasQ) on The Role of Multiple Accent in Alternative Questions.
In the afternoon, at 2:15 p.m, XPrag.de associate Stefan Hinterwimmer (Cologne) will talk on How to point at discourse referents: On anaphoric and bound uses of complex demonstratives.

In addition, there will be some poster presentations. XPrag.de associates Chao Sun and Richard Breheny will present a poster on Approaching scalar diversity through (RSA with) Lexical Uncertainty. Bob van Tiel from project MUQTASP will present a poster together with Elizabeth Pankratz and Chao Sun on Scalar diversity: a processing perspective. Berry Claus, Felix Frühauf and Manfred Krifka (project YesNo1) will present a poster on Negation and polarity-ambiguous propositional anaphors and, Patrick Elliott and Uli Sauerland will present a poster on Ineffability and Unexhaustification.

The program of the workshop “The pragmatics of quantifiers: implicature and presupposition – experiment and theory” to take place from June 6-7th, 2018, at ZAS Berlin is online now. Details can be found here!

There will be several presentations by XPrag.de members at The 28th Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) conference, which will take place on May 18-20, 2018 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

XPrag.de coordinator Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin) will give a talk on Saturday, May 19th at 9 a.m. on “The Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis”.

Furthermore there will be four poster presentations by XPrag.de members.

On Friday, May 18th at the Poster session 2 (4:00-5:30), XPrag.de members Nicole Gotzner (SiGames, Berlin), Stephanie Solt (associate, ZAS Berlin) and Anton Benz (SiGames, Berlin) will present a poster on “Scalar implicature and negative strengthening in different types of gradable adjectives”

On Saturday, May 19th at the Poster session 3 (11:30-1:00), Nicole Gotzner will present a second poster together with Jacopo Romoli (Ulster) and Paolo Santorio (San Diego) on “More free choice and more inclusion: An experimental investigation of free choice in non-monotonic environments”

On Saturday, May 19th at the Poster session 4 (4:00-5:30), XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt will present a second poster together with Jon Stevens (Ohio) on “Some three students: Towards a unified account of ‘some’”. A further poster will be presented by XPrag.de member Carla Bombi (ExQ, Potsdam) on “Definiteness in Akan (Kwa): familiarity and uniqueness revisited”.

On May 8th, XPrag.de PhD-student Carla Bombi from project “ExQ” in Potsdam will present joint work with Lea Fricke (Graz), Edgar Onea (Graz) and Malte Zimmermann (Potsdam) in the SynSem colloquium. The title of the talk is “Exhaustivity in questions: Two pilot studies on interrogatives embedded under German wissen (know)”

Time and venue: 8th May 2018, 16.15 – 17.45; Potsdam Golm, building 14, room 0.32

Abstract
The talk is concerned with sentences such as (1), containing an interrogative clause embedded under the factive “know”:
(1) Johannes knows which students failed.
The semantic literature disagrees as to what (1) means, concretely how much Johannes needs to know for (1) to be true: does he have to know of every student that failed that she failed? Or is partial knowledge sufficient? Is knowledge about the set of people who didn’t fail also required? As a result of this debate, a number of so-called “exhaustivity levels” have been posited in the literature, which capture the different conceivable readings of (1). Although there is a consensus that some notion of exhaustivity/completeness is required in this type of sentences, its exact source and the conditions under which it arises are still unclear. Elucidating the readings that are possible and as well as their sources is crucial for understanding the semantics of
(embedded) questions.
In this talk, we present the results of two pilot studies on German interrogatives embedded under “wissen” (“know”). In the first study, the availability of the different “exhaustivity levels” was tested for sentences such as (1) in a truth value judgement task. The second study investigates the sources of exhaustivity in (1). The hypothesis entertained is that two of the readings that have been posited for (1) (the so-called strongly exhaustive and intermediate exhaustive readings) arise as the result of a de re / de dicto ambiguity, i.e. a clash between the knowledege of the reporter of the sentence and the knowledge of the subject (“Johannes” in (1)).

The program of the workshop “Implicit and explicit marking of discourse relations: the comparison between causals vs. conditionals” to take place from May 24th to May 25th, 2018 at the University of Osnabrück is online now. Details can be found here!

On May 8th, Marie-Christine Meyer from project LISI at ZAS Berlin will give a talk at the Oberseminar English Linguistics (Syntax–Semantics). The title of the talk is “Towards a compositional semantics for L+H*LH%”

Abstract
In this talk I will work towards a compositional semantics of complex intonational structures involving a contrastive pitch accent L+H* and a final fall or rise (LL% or LH%). I will show how the semantic composition of L+H* with LX% offers a unifying new perspective on constructions traditionally described as “meta-linguistic negation”, “contrastive negation” and “contrastive focus”.