Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Colloquium 2/20 - Sigrid Beck (Tübingen)

Speaker: Sigrid Beck (Tübingen)
Title: Readings of ‘noch’ (still)
Date: Friday, February 20th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

The talk develops an analysis of the particle ‘noch’, the German counterpart of ‘still’. These particles can give rise to a lot of different readings, making it hard to figure out their semantic contribution (e.g. ‘Washington still wore a wig’). The literature has analysed ‘noch/still’ as focus sensitive and ambiguous. I suggest that it is not focus sensitive, and I try to propose just one lexical entry to account for the different readings that sentences with ‘noch/still’ can have.