Cécile Meier

I am a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the department of linguistics of Frankfurt University. We host the DFG funded graduate school "Nominal Modification" where I am one of the principal investigators. Furthermore, I am ERASMUS coordinator for the students of the linguistics department. [CV] [e-mail]

Unterricht in Frankfurt

Einführung in die Sprachwissenschaft I/II: Bitte melden Sie sich über [QIS] für diesen Kurs an. Sie werden dann zurück eingeladen auf der OLAT-Plattform, die alle weitere Information beinhaltet. Bitte überprüfen Sie regelmässig Ihren Maileingang über die Uni-Mail-Adresse (vom HRZ-Account). Wenn Sie offiziell angemeldet sind, müssen Sie sonst nichts tun als auf die Einladung zu warten. Sie können schon mal lesen, wenn Ihnen langweilig ist: Steven Pinker "Der Sprachinstinkt" eignet sich.

Für alle anderen Kurse bitte ich die Studierenden hiermit, sich im [QIS] für den entsprechenden OLAT-Kurs zu registrieren oder/und sich bei mir per e-mail zu anzumelden.
Bitte erwähnen Sie im Betreff:

• [SW-EV202x] und Ihren Namen für das Seminar Einführung in die Sprachwissenschaft
• [PdS202x] und Ihren Namen für das Seminar Phänomene der Semantik
• [SemI202x], [SemII202x] oder [SemIII202x] und Ihren Namen für das Seminar Semantik I/II/III
• [ThemaBA202x] und Ihren Namen für thematische Seminare aus dem BA-Studiengängen/Lehramtsstudiengängen.
• [ThemaMA202x] und Ihren Namen für thematische Seminare aus dem MA-Studiengang Linguistik.

Diese Mails gelten dann als Anmeldung und Sie werden über OLAT weiter informiert, wie es weiter geht.

Recent Talks

In September 2023, I presented a talk on "On Differences in Kind Readings". I related the frequencies of different classes of adjectival modifiers of two nouns in German: "Auto" 'car' and "Flugzeug" 'airplane' to the psychological notions of Conceptual Distinctiveness (how many obvious subcategories there are to a concept), object frequency in typical visual input, and recognition performance in picture matching tasks. And, I calculate the entropies for the distribution of adjectival modification of the two nouns in the DWDS core corpus (https://www.dwds.de/r). High entropy of the modification distribution is a good predictor for high distinctiveness and high object frequency in visual data for the concept related to the noun modified (many, even overlapping subcategories are available for the concept representing "Auto" 'car', wooden cars, blue cars, big cars etc.). Low distinctiveness might be related to what is called 'well-establishedness of a kind' in linguistics. [Slides] [Entropy - R Markdown]

In Mai 2023, I gave a talk on Negation at the Special Workshop on the History of Negation in the honor of Larry Horn at SALT : "How many negations are there?" The goal was to recall from the literature that negation interacts scopally with many types of quantifiers, even invisible ones like the degree operator POS, proposed by in the literature on comparison. Affixal negation seems scopaly inert with respect to the nominal quantifiers in the same sentence. But the hypothesis that an interpretation as classical negation is sufficient in order to capture the data remains valid. In order to account for data that contrqadicts this hypothesis, I proposed for the first time that the degree operator POS (usually a universal degree quantifier) also has an existential variant. A previous variant of this talk was also presented in Mai 2022 at GGS in Stuttgart.

In March 2023, I gave a talk at the Workshop 'History of Negation' hosted online by Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal and Chiara Gianollo on "Deverbal Adjectives and Negatability Patterns" (in collaboration with Helmut Weiß). The main topic of the talk was to explain why the negative affix in "unaufhörlich" cannot be dropped and how it is related to "anfänglich". "Anfänglich" prohibits affixation with un-. The explanation rests on the assumption that aufhörlich is an word-internal NPI and requires (word-internal) NPI licensing. And "anfänglich" is the corresponding PPI. This paper was presented also in September 2022 in Budapest at FASL. [Slides]

In May 2019, I was at SALT in Los Angeles and presented my poster on Swiss German definite articles. I relate the choice of the article to the temporal interpretation of the DP. Whereas in languages like English definite DPs are ambiguous between a time-dependent and a time independent reading, Swiss German distinguishes the reading by using the short or the long version of the definite article. [Poster][Paper] In the mean time I am an associate member of the Network "https://www.definiteness-across-domains.org" where I also presented my work on definiteness.

In January 2019, I gave a presentation in a mini-workshop on result clause constructions at Frankfurt University. The aim of the talk was to show where the differences between result clause constructions and resultatives are. I defended the view that resultatives may get a similar meaning as result clause constructions, an idea brought up by Monica-Mihaela Rizea and Manfred Sailer, who organized the workshop together. Jack Hoeksema was invited speaker. [Slides]

Manuscripts

Definiteness: Gagarin was the first human to travel to space. Appeared in SemCom 2021 [Paper]

Temporal information and definite descriptions: The view from Swiss German To appear in Proceedings of SALT 29

Disjunction in Comparatives 2018 [Paper] [Poster]

Degree relative clauses 2015 [Paper], Review of Grosu and Landmann 2015 [Shorty]

Supervision

I supervised Abigail Anne Bimpeh's dissertation on Ewe semantics Logophoricity in Ewe: An Empirical-Semantic Assessment of y`e who is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher LeibnizDream project (PI: Uli Sauerland) at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemiene Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin. And, I am supervising Ahmad Al-Bitar who is working on different topics related to definiteness in Syrian Arabic. Both were members of the graduate school on nominal modification.

Collaboration

I mainly collaborated with Ede Zimmermann. Together, we led the project Relativsätze und Intensionalität as part of the Research Group "Relativsätze" 1783 (also with Magdalena Kaufmann). More recently, I started a collaboration with Helmut Weiß. The collaboration seeks to explain word formation patterns concerning "un"-affixation in German and to gain new insights on the development of Jesperson's cycle. We look at baseless negated adjectives (BNDAs) and negative polar adjectives (NPAs). The former resist dropping the negative affix, the latter do not allow affixation of the negative affix (UNLESS the are further negated) in German.

CV

Teaching

Aktuell Universität Tübingen, Seminar für englische Sprache und Sprachwissenschaft Universität Tübingen, Seminar für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft European Summer School for Language, Logic and Information Universität Frankfurt, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur II Universität Frankfurt, Institut für Kognitive Linguistik Universität Wuppertal, Fachbereich A, Germanistik (Vertr.-Prof.) Universität Göttingen Englische Philologie/Pragmalinguistik (Vertr.-Prof.) Universität Frankfurt, IEAS, English Lingusitics (Vertr.-Prof.)

Lectures

Konferenz- und Workshopbeiträge Andere Vorträge

Publications

Manuskripte Bücher Publizierte Artikel

Misc.

Recherchierbare Korpora

• Glossanet (engl./franz.)
• COSMAS IDS Mannheim (deutsch)
• Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache

Sprachwissenschaftliche Gesellschaften

• Gesellschaft für Semantik
• Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft
• Linguistics Society of America
  

Das Wetter in der Schweiz

• click here

Lehrreich und lustig - finde ich

• Schweizer Dialekte
• Grounded Cognition (bis zu Ende kucken)