Talk on modal particles at GGS

This weekend, the 39th Generative Grammar of the South meeting, better known as just GGS, took place at University of Frankfurt. Together with Katharina Turgay, I gave a talk on the linearization of modal particles in German, which was rather empirically oriented (without much theory) and presented a corpus analysis of the position in which modal partilces occur in spontaneous speech. (slides as .pdf).

The meeting was a lot of fun – as always – and there were many very interesting talks. I especially enjoyed Michael Wagner's talk on a generalization of Hurford's constraint to any kind of alternative sets, as well as Gert Webelhuth's talk on extraposition, which incorporates Drach's classical topological field model of German sentence structure as lexical features into a HPSG framework.

Talk at UGöttingen on multidimensionality (in semantic change)

I gave an invited talk on multidimensionality in semantic change today at University of Göttingen. The talk was (supposed  to be) a slightly extended version of the talk I gave in Austin at the workshop on semantic change. For a colloquium, it had many hear's and the exchange with the faculty members and students was very lively and stimulating, especially on the formal underpinning of the approach. So much, actually, that I wasn't even able to talk on the pragmaticalization of  German obwohl “although”, which -- like in may talk at Austin -- was supposed to be the major case study for illustrating the general idea of pragmaticalization of a semantic type shift between meaning dimensions. For those who are interested in catching up on this, you can download the slides for the talk here.

References and publication pages

During the last days, I restructured the work page. Now, the links take you to dedicated publication pages where you find an abstract of the paper and the possibility to download it. I also added links to export the bibliographical data as a .bib-file. In addition, you can also get the references for my publications all at once, either as .bib or .pdf.