People

Director

headshot-liz Elizabeth Coppock (Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, Boston University) is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Boston University, specializing in semantics and pragmatics. 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 Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg, in the department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science, where she has worked since 2012. See her website for an updated list of publications.

Postdoctoral Researcher

1579331_elizabeth 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

David Alvarez (Senior in Mathematics, Linguistics, Boston University) is working in the field of degree semantics to develop a compositional understanding of compound unit functions through the use of group and field theory.

Danielle Dionne (MA, Florida Atlantic University) is a PhD student in linguistics at Boston University. She is currently helping to develop a model that uses Bayesian reasoning to generate referring expressions for complex images. Additionally, she is working on a multilingual RSA model that can account for cross-linguistic pragmatic differences given hyponym complexity.

Nathanial Graham (undergraduate in international relations, Boston University) has earned UROP funding for summer 2019. He is working on a collaborative effort to create a Bayesian model of referring expression generation using complex visual images.

Dylan Pato (undergraduate student in Linguistics and Philosophy, Boston University) is developing a theoretical framework for the experimental analysis of non-cooperative (even adversarial or strategic) conversational contexts.

Marina Weinstein (MA, Boston University) completed a Master’s in Linguistics in May 2019. She is currently doing research on consent and the law as an instance of non-cooperative cooperation. She has previously looked into the cognitive processing of typos in digital text.

Ayana Whitmal (MA in Linguistics, Boston University) completed a linguistics master’s degree at BU in May 2019. Currently helping with experiment on consent to ‘requests’ as given in situations of varying risk and provided information. Research interests include syntax, dialectal variation within English, semantics, AAE. Will begin PhD candidacy in the fall at UMASS Amherst.

Previous Students and Research Assistants

Pamela Sugrue (senior in linguistics, Boston University) has earned a UROP Humanities Scholars Award for fall 2018. She is working on experimental and field methods for studying gradable adjectives in English and Swahili.

Varun Malikayil (junior in computer engineering, Boston University) has won a fall 2018 UROP award aimed at developing a protocol for the analysis of eye-tracking data gathered through a web interface.

Sam Krasnoff (freshman in computer science, Boston University) helps with development and coding of auditory stimuli and hardware setup for eye-tracking, recruiting and running participants, and data analysis.

Richard Cho (junior in computer science, Boston University) codes programs in HTML, CSS, Perl, and Javascript for experimental work using eye-tracking and helps with setting up and running the experiments.

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Miriam Yifrach (BA/MA student, Boston University) has carried out original fieldwork on definiteness-marking in the Neo-Aramaic dialect of Turoyo. Miriam’s research was funded through UROP in summer 2018, and she will be presenting her work at a workshop entitled “Sorting Out Definiteness” in Bremen, Germany in March 2019.

Elias Ganem (undergraduate student, Boston University) has developed an interactive experimental paradigm for investigating “superlative” interpretations of proportional quantifiers like “most”, and tested them in English and in other languages. Eli was awarded a Humanities Scholars Award by the UROP program in summer 2018 and his work was presented at a workshop entitled “Quantity in Language and Thought” in Sofia, Bulgaria in August 2018.

Golsa Nouri-Hosseini (MA, University of Gothenburg) completed a master’s in linguistics in September 2018. Her master’s thesis focusses on semantic field methods, comparing storyboards with picture-aided translation, through a case study on quantity superlatives in Persian.

Anne Bertolini (MA in Applied Linguistics, Boston University). Anne’s thesis concerns the many uses of the determiner some and the extent to which these might be unifiable under a single analysis.

Sabrina Tran (MA in Linguistics, Boston University). Design and development visual and auditory stimuli for web-based and eye-tracking experiments using visual world paradigms and selection of an appropriate response in a dialogue in multiple languages.

Tomiris Kaumenova (undergraduate student, Boston University) is an international sophomore from Almaty, Kazakhstan, double-majoring in chemistry and French Linguistics. She has focussed on on morphological analysis of data from Kazakh, Russian, and Evenki.