Gert-Jan Schoenmakers: The wonderful world of island experiments Date: Monday, 12 May 2025 Time: 11:00 – 12:00 Location: Trans 10, room 0.19 Abstract An important discussion in syntactic research revolves around the question whether the phenomena we observe are due to specific constraints on language structure or due to non-syntactic components of human cognition. A…

Asya Achimova: A neo-Gricean account of indirect communication Date: Monday, 14 April 2025 Time: 11:00-12:00 Location: Muntstraat 2A, room 111   More details about the talks, including abstracts, can be found on the ELITU website. If you would like to present in the ELITU series, please get in touch with one of the organizers. The…

Tom Roberts (UU/ILS) and Kelsey Sasaki (University of Oxford) will be giving the next ELITU talk, with the title Oh, what predicates embed exclamatives! The talk will take place on the 13th of May at 11:00, at Janskerkhof 13, 006. Abstract The semantic status of wh-exclamative clauses (What a furry wombat that is!) is highly debated. Though they…

Priming scalar alternatives: The effects of negation and antonymy

Imke Kruitwagen (Utrecht) will give a talk on December 12, with the title Alternate categorization: a formal-conceptual semantics of reciprocal alternations All invited! Abstract In this talk, we present an experimental study that investigates how the different forms of a reciprocal verbs are connected to each other. Reciprocal verbs as hug, fight and collide alternate between a unary collective form…