Author: Elizabeth Coppock

New cross-linguistic paper on implicatures

Differences in implicature across languages stem from differences in salience of alternatives by Danielle Dionne & Elizabeth Coppock Abstract Scalar implicature depends on the activation of alternatives. For instance, in English, finger implicates `not thumb’, suggesting that thumb is activated an alternative. Is this because it is more specific (Quantity) and equally short (Manner)? Indeed, […]

Summer UROP award to James Cooper Roberts

James Cooper Roberts has been awarded a summer UROP fellowship, to work on the project of automatically generating referring expressions for objects in complex scenes. He will be developing an annotated corpus. Welcome!

Ying Gong & Elizabeth Coppock present at LSA!

Ying Gong and Elizabeth Coppock presented a talk entitled “Mandarin has degree abstraction after all” at the LSA in January 2021. If you missed it, don’t worry — you can watch it here! http://eecoppock.info/LSA-Ying+Liz.mp4 And here are the slides: http://eecoppock.info/Ying+Coppock-LSA2021Slides-Mandarin_Degree_Abstraction.pdf

Probability and Meaning 2020

We gave a talk at the Probability and Meaning conference, hosted by the University of Gothenburg in October 2020. In this talk, we undertake a side-by-side comparison between image captioning and reference game human datasets and show that they differ systematically with respect to informativity.   The related paper can be found here: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.pam-1.14.pdf It […]

Published in Language!

An article entitled “Universals in Superlative Semantics” by Elizabeth Coppock, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten, and Golsa Nouri-Hosseini has been published in Language, the official journal of the Linguistic Society of America! Click here to read it. Abstract: This article reports on the results of a broad crosslinguistic study on the semantics of quantity words such as many […]

Ying Gong presents at LFRG

On Wednesday, September 23rd, Ying Gong presented her work in progress on degree abstraction in Mandarin at LFRG (LF Reading Group) at MIT. Abstract: According to Beck et al. (2004), not all languages with degree predicates have degree abstraction. A language with a negative setting of their degree abstraction parameter (DAP) is one in which […]

Poster to be presented at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM)

Danielle Dionne and Elizabeth Coppock will be giving a poster called “Tattoos as a window onto cross-linguistic differences in scalar implicature” at the first annual Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference, to be hosted virtually by the University of Pennsylvania, September 16-18: https://www.elm-conference.net/2020-conference/program/poster-sessions/