In November, Ohio State Linguistics hosted the fourth Formal Diachronic Semantics workshop (FoDS4). Organized by our own Dr. Ashwini Deo and others, the workshop featured speakers including Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford), Igor Yanovich (Tübingen), Itamar Francez (Chicago), and Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (HUJI).
FoDS is an exciting opportunity for scholars of semantics and pragmatics from around the world to come together and has previously been hosted by the University of Oslo (Norway, 2018), Saarland University (Germany, 2017), and the University of Konstanz (Germany, 2016). The conference emerged from a number of different events organized by various groups interested in formal diachronic semantics and the first official FoDS conference was held in 2016, organized by Regine Eckardt.
This year’s conference featured sessions about topics such as possessive modality (Cleo Condoravdi), progressive to imperfective shifts in Spanish (Martin Fuchs and Maria Pinango), and norm-related comparatives (Paul Kiparsky), among many others.
The Ohio State Department of Linguistics would like to extend sincerest thanks to all the organizers, speakers, and attendees who contributed to the success of this conference.