We are glad to announce that the informal proceedings of the workshop ‘Cross-Linguistic Semantics of Reciprocals‘ (Utrecht University, 7th-8th October) are now available online: Informal proceedings of the workshop ‘Cross-linguistic semantics of reciprocals’.

DATE: 9th October 2019, 11.00 – 12.30 LOCATION: Drift 23, room 0.10 TITLE: Mereological choices for count nouns and mass nouns AUTHOR: David Nicolas (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, EHESS, PSL, CNRS) ABSTRACT: Many semantic theories about count nouns and mass nouns use mereological notions like part and sum. At the lexical level, count nouns are often…

Exclusives and exceptives as sentential coordinators (or: Only, there’s another *only*) by Kai von Fintel (11 June 2019) Speaker: Kai von Fintel (MIT) Room:   Drift 25 – room 105 Date:     Tuesday 11 June Time:    15.15-17.00 We present work in progress on an understudied phenomenon: the use of exclusive and exceptives as sentential coordinators. Some examples…

Workshop on Cross-Linguistic Semantics of Reciprocals We are glad to announce that on the 7th and 8th of October, the workshop “Cross-linguistic semantics of reciprocals” will take place at Utrecht University. The workshop will bring together formal semanticists and experts of reciprocity phenomena, with the goal of addressing some of the major questions in this area. Keynote…

Many Romance languages use items like “se” (French) or “si” (Italian) to express reflexivity or reciprocity. Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is another Romance language where the item “se” expresses reflexivity and reciprocity, but such interpretations may also appear without this element. In this talk, we show evidence for a general distinction between lexical (L) reciprocity/reflexivity and…

This mini-workshop will report recent findings of the ROCKY team (https://rocky.sites.uu.nl) on reciprocal predicates in three typologically different languages: Italian, Dutch and Hebrew. The two talks will discuss the semantics of reciprocal predicates and the SI construction in Italian, the reciprocal middle template in Hebrew, and the interpretation of discontinuous reciprocal predicates (knuffelen met “hug with”) in Dutch. Workshop program —…

Sentence-internal “different” as a lexical reciprocal Alon Fishman, Tel-Aviv University Abstract This talk is concerned with a particular sentence-internal reading of  predicates like “different”, here called the *plural-dependent* reading. I argue for an analysis of this reading in terms of lexical reciprocity (Siloni 2012, Winter 2018). The plural-dependent reading has received substantial attention in the literature, but mostly…

The Geometry of Syntax Matilde Marcolli California Institute of Technology Tuesday 17 April at 15.15 Drift 21 Utrecht Abstract Chomsky’s “Principles and Parameters” model proposes that syntactic structures can be encoded into a set of binary syntactic parameters. A main problem in this approach is identifying a good set of independent variables among these syntactic…

  Dear students and colleagues, Next week, Jon Gajewski from UConn (Connecticut, USA) will visit UiL-OTS. He is an expert on negative polarity items and neg-raising. You can find more about his research on his webpage: https://jon-gajewski.uconn.edu/ He will give two crash courses and one seminar. You are all very much invited to join both the courses and the seminar….

ROCKY seminar on reciprocity, collectivity and typicality  When people say that a certain debate is “semantic”, they often mean that it concerns unimportant terminological issues. In this seminar we address some semantic debates that are hopefully more substantial. Imke Kruitwagen will review a debate between Godehard Link and Remko Scha on the origins of our understanding of sentences like “the…