LEL’s Ryan Smith ventured to Newcastle last week, intrepid despite the cold snap and the British trains. Our friends in the North got to enjoy a seminar talk by him on “Agentless presuppositions, resultatives, and the semantics of eventive verbs.”
October 12, 2022 by manling
Comments Off on Semantics Lab
The LEL semanticists have a new forum, the Semantics Lab, a “space to share work-in-progress and cool data with a focus on semantics and cross-linguistic variation”. The series kicked off on Tuesday (11th October) with a talk by Changxin Ke, a recent MA alumnus, who spoke on “The Semantics of Mandarin Repetitive Adverb ‘chongxin’”. The presenters […]
July 6, 2022 by manling
Comments Off on Tripla AFLA Workshop at Manchester
Last week, Manchester hosted TripleAFLA, a joint conference combining the 9th TripleA workshop for semantic fieldworkers and the 29th annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA). The organising team were Vera Hohaus, Jens Hopperdietzel, Margit Bowler, Emily Hanink and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. The conference featured 28 presenters and six invited speakers, and it was attended […]
July 1, 2022 by manling
Comments Off on Successful viva for Roisin Cosnahan
Congratulations to Roisin Cosnahan, who has passed her viva this morning! The title of Roisin’s dissertation is “The Role of Pragmatics in the Evolution of Negation in Northern Italian Dialects”. She’s been focusing on the uses and diachronic evolution of postverbal negative markers in Lombardian and Venetian varieties from the 13th to the 20th c., […]
June 17, 2022 by manling
Comments Off on Postgraduate Summer Research Showcase award for Barrios-Jurado
A picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s not always easy to capture linguistic topics in an image. Anyone who ever wrote a departmental linguistics blog and had to find images to accompany posts about formal semantics will know exactly what I mean. With this in mind, prepared to be impressed by the achievement […]
June 9, 2022 by manling
Comments Off on Hopperdietzel in Glossa
LEL’s Jens Hopperdietzel has just had a paper published in Glossa. The paper, titled “Talmy’s typology in serializing languages: Variations on a VP” brings in new evidence from Mandarin and Samoan on the typology of resultative constructions. The paper is available Open Access at https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/7686/. The abstract is below. “Talmy’s typology in serializing languages: Variations […]
March 7, 2022 by manling
Comments Off on Jens Hopperdietzel at LEL Seminar
This week’s LEL seminar will feature our very own Jens Hopperdietzel, who will present on “Manner/result polysemy in Daakaka” (see below for an abstract). The talk will take place on Tuesday 8th March at 4pm in Samuel Alexander. There is also an option of following it remotely via zoom. Manner/result polysemy in Daakaka: Complex […]
November 17, 2021 by manling
Comments Off on Rutland viva-ed
Congratulations to Colin Rutland on passing his viva voce! Colin’s dissertation is titled “The lexical semantics of gradable nouns in English”. It provides a revised explanation of the meaning of potentially ambiguous adnominally modified noun phrases like “big smoker” and “complete idiot” using degree semantics and the theory of kinds. Colin explored the grammar of […]
November 15, 2021 by manling
Comments Off on Louise McNally at the SynSemLab
The next SynSemLab will host a special guest, Louise McNally from the Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona, joining in person. The speaker will give a talk on “Grammatically relevant aspects of meaning and verbal polysemy” (abstract below). The meeting will be on Wednesday, 17 November at 11am Manchester time. All are welcome to attend in Sam Alex_A116, […]
October 18, 2021 by manling
Comments Off on Empson, Ma, Weingartz and Wu in Semantic Fieldwork Methods
Many congratulations to our recent UG graduates Alice Empson, Jiayin Ma, Siena Weingartz, and Xiaoye Wu for their publication in Semantic Field Work Methods! Their paper “Exploring comparison constructions in Ndebele and Mandarin: The storyboard The Twin Dilemma” presents a method for eliciting comparative constructions in semantic fieldwork, using a storyboard. This work originated in […]
December 14, 2022 by manling
Comments Off on Smith in Newcastle