UROP awards to Elias Ganem and Miriam Yifrach

Boston University’s UROP program has generously agreed to fund two exciting summer projects!

Elias Ganem: Cross-linguistic experimental investigations of fragile superlative readings

In this project, we will carry out experiments probing the meaning of proportional quantifiers such as “most” in several different languages. The goal is to determine whether the “fragile superlative reading” that has been detected for English exists in languages where proportional quantifiers differ from English in their morphological structure.

Miriam Yifrach: Defining definiteness in Turoyo

In this project, we will carry out an investigation of definiteness-marking in Turoyo, an endangered Semitic language, based on interviews with native speakers. The goals are to determine where definiteness-marking lies on the spectrum from “weak” to “strong”, and to characterize the circumstances under which definiteness-marking is used in combination with quantificational expressions.