[Linguistik] Invitation to this week's IKW Colloquium talk by Prof. Anastasia Giannakidou

[Mingya Liu]

Dear colleagues, dear students,

I am very happy to invite you to this week's Colloquium talk by Prof. Dr.
Anastasia Giannakidou. Dr. Giannakidou
(https://linguistics.uchicago.edu/faculty/giannakidou) is professor of
linguistics at the University of Chicago and one of the leading figures in
natural language semantics in the world.

Title of the talk: The past, the future, and the fact
Date and time: May 23, 17:00 (sharp!!)
Venu: 93/E31 (Barbarastraße 22c)

Abstract: In this talk, we start with the apparent temporal contrast
between past and future in order to gain insight into how speakers
understand the veridicality of sentences containing past and future
expressions. Evidence will be provided that the future contains epistemic
modal components, and I will treat future expressions such as will and its
Greek counterpart tha as epistemic modals. I will suggest that German
future is also an epistemic modal. Future sentences will be claimed to be
subjective and nonveridical, hence they do not refer to facts — they are
rather assessments of individuals about potential facts, and can vary in
the degree of certainty that the speaker has about potential facts
becoming actual facts. The past, on the other hand, is veridical and
refers to facts. The contrast will allow us to understand properties of
future morphemes, as well as how language encodes the speakers’
understanding of truth and reality.

After the talk, we will go for dinner at Amodomio Pizzeria Ristorante
(Heger Straße 12, 49074 Osnabrück). In addition, Prof. Giannakdiou will
give another invited talk at the workshop on discourse relations on May
24-25, 2018 here in Osnabrück - for details, please check this link:
http://www.xprag.de/?page_id=5450
Everyone is cordially invited to the workshop too!

Best,
Mingya Liu