People

Director

  Elizabeth Coppock (Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, Boston University) is an Assistant Professor specializing in semantics and pragmatics and the director of the Linguistic Semantics Lab at Boston University.  As the Principal Investigator of the Swedish Research Council project Most and more: Quantity superlatives across languages, she also maintains a part-time position as biträdande lektor at the University of Gothenburg, in the department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science, where she has worked since 2012.  Her research concerns the meanings of small words in various languages, the invisible forces that give complex expressions their meanings, and sometimes even the nature of meaning itself.

Postdoctoral Researcher

 Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (Researcher, University of Gothenburg) is postdoctoral researcher in linguistics based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden as part of the project Most and more: Quantity superlatives across languages. Previously, she was a teaching postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University, where she investigated the semantics and syntax of relative clauses in certain understudied languages.  Her research in general focuses on what we can learn about crosslinguistic semantic variation and commonality. Many of her projects take as their starting point data from Navajo (Diné Bizaad) and other Athabaskan languages, which she has been investigating since 2008.

Students and Research Assistants

 Golsa Nouri-Hosseini (master’s student, University of Gothenburg) is a master’s student working on semantic field methods, comparing storyboards with picture-aided translation, through a case study on quantity superlatives in Persian.

Anne Bertolini (master’s student, Boston University) is completing a Masters in Applied Linguistics with a critical literature review exploring the possibility of a unified analysis of the determiner some, with a focus on the semantic and pragmatic properties of some in various syntactic frames.

Sabrina Tran (recent MA in Linguistics, Boston University) is a research assistant with a Master’s in Linguistics.  She is currently working on an eye-tracking experiment with Professor Coppock and Dr. Aparicio as well as her own research on superlative exhaustivity.

Elias Ganem (undergraduate student, Boston University) is a third-year undergraduate student studying Linguistics with a minor in Computer Science. His current research involves experimentally investigating “superlative” interpretations of proportional quantifers, and further distinctions between their respective proportional readings.

  Miriam Yifrach (undergraduate student, Boston University) is a student in the BA/MA Linguistics program at Boston University. Working with Professor Elizabeth Coppock and the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, she researches the nature of the definite article (‘the’) cross-linguistically, and specifically in the Neo-Aramaic dialect of Turoyo. 

 Tomiris Kaumenova (undergraduate student, Boston University) is an international sophomore from Almaty, Kazakhstan, double-majoring in chemistry and french Linguistics. She currently works under the supervision of Professor Coppock, analyzing data in various languages, glossing to find words denoting quantity and determine whether they have relative or proportional reading or both.

External Collaborators

Lots of wonderful people at other institutions!