Pamela Sugrue presents her research in Sweden!

LiSLab undergraduate Pamela Sugrue did us proud this December, presenting her work at a workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden entitled “Fieldwork: Methods and Theory“, held at the University of Gothenburg 13-14 December, 2018. Her talk, entitled “A method for detecting superlative interpretations of positive adjectives”, addresses what to make of the situation where, in a fieldwork setting, the consultant translates superlative-form adjectives using positive-form predicates. Does this mean that the positive form has a superlative interpretation, as Vera Hohaus argued for Samoan? Pamela’s fieldwork showed that Swahili does not pattern like Samoan, where positive forms have a superlative interpretation, and went further to establish that the positive form is not even ambiguous between a positive interpretation and a superlative one, building on experimental literature on scale structure.

The talk was very well-received and she acquired a new “Swedish mother”, her host, shown in the picture.