Professor Coppock presents in Ghana

Professor Coppock gave an invited talk at the University of Ghana in Accra, for a meeting of a German-based international network of researchers on definiteness. The focus of the workshop was on definiteness-marking and clausal determiners in Akan and other languages of West Africa. For bare nouns in Akan vs. ones marked by the definiteness marker nó, Coppock advocated for a fresh approach, forgetting about the familiarity vs. uniqueness distinction, inspired by recent work on bare nouns in Mandarin.

The handout is available here.

There were many interesting talks. Samson Korsah is pictured here leading a discussion on Gã.

Among the discoveries of the trip was that there is a stunningly beautiful tree outside the linguistics department at the University of Ghana: