Zoltan in Sinn und Bedeutung

Last week Zoltan participated in the Sinn und Bedeutung 23, which took place in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in September 5-7, 2018. Sinn und Bedeutung is one of the most important conferences on formal semantics in the world and was particularly competitive this year.

In addition to chairing one session, Zoltan presented the talk called “Not all state nominalizations are mass nouns”, in which he argues against the standard analysis according to which there is a mapping from atelicity onto the mass domain. On the basis of certain specific data in Spanish that have gone unnoticed in the literature so far, he claims that the requirement for predicative bases to form mass nominalizations is that they must be gradable rather than atelic.

“It was a pleasure to meet again my colleagues and friends of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This type of conferences promote the linguistic debate at a high level in an ideal atmosphere in which not only professors, but also students, feel comfortable enough to share their ideas. Special thanks to the organizers for making that possible”.

Nominalizations in Fribourg

Zoltan Zato presented a talk entitled “Degrees and entities in the nominal domain” in the 7e Journées d’Etudes sur les Nominalisations (Jenom7), which was held in the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) on June 1-2, 2017.

The workshop brought together crosslinguistic works on nominalizations from different perspectives, including topics in syntax, morphology, and semantics.

Zoltan’s talk foccused on the semantics of three Spanish structures involving gradability and their contribution regarding the ontology of semantic objects.

Short stay in Manchester

From the 3rd of February to the 2nd of May of 2017, Zoltan Zato had a short stay in the Department of Linguistics and English Language of the University of Manchester, under the supervision of Dr Andrew Koontz-Garboden.

In the University of Manchester, Zoltan worked on the analysis of Spanish deadjectival nominalizations, which is the topic of his ongoing dissertation. The meetings with Andrew were extremely productive and insightful.

Zoltan also attended the seminars of the department, the Semantics Labs, the Time Meetings, the Minimalist Syntax course (taught by Dr Julio Villa-García), and the Manchester Forum in Linguistics (mFiL) conference.