Merle Weicker
Alumni
Dissertation Topic
In my dissertation project “The semantics of adjectives in acquisition” (SOFAA) I am dealing with the question how monolingual German-speaking children acquire the semantics of adjectives with focus on entailment-based properties of adjectives like intersectivity and subsectivity and their gradability characteristics. The first step is to find out whether the different semantic properties are mirrored in children’s productive lexicon using data from a spontaneous speech corpus. The comprehension of specific aspects concerning the gradability of adjectives will be tested in comprehension experiments.
This topic is interesting for language developmental as well as for theoretical and methodological reasons.
Publications
Talks
2016 |
Red train, big train, broken train - semantic aspects of adjectives in child language Conference Poster presented at 7th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA-7), 2016. |
The semantics of adjectives in acquisition: First insights from production Conference Workshop on Complexity in Acquisition, University of Toronto, 2016. |
2015 |
How are exhaustivity and universal quantification related? Evidence from (un)impaired child German. Conference 12th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA 12), University of Nantes, 2015. |
Who knows what about exhaustivity and quantification? Evidence from (un)impaired German-speaking children. Conference Poster presented at Child Language Symposium, University of Warwick, 2015. |
2014 |
Quantifizierung und Exhaustivität im (un)gestörten Spracherwerb Conference 6. Semantik und Pragmatik im Südwesten, University Bielefeld, 2014. |