On Friday October 18th, we will have our first meeting of the African Linguistics Club, with a talk by Ousmane Cisse and Elizabeth Coppock on the X-woo-X construction in Mandinka, an interesting way of expressing distributivity through reduplication. The talk will take place in the African Studies Center’s seminar room at 232 Bay State Road, […]
The Proceedings of Triple A 10 have just been published, including a contribution by BU PhD student Ousmane Cisse and Prof. Elizabeth Coppock entitled “Reduplicated distributivity in Mandinka”. Here is a PDF of the published paper, and here is the video of our talk: Cite as: Cisse, Ousmane and Elizabeth Coppock (2024). Reduplicated Distributivity […]
Elizabeth Coppock, David Beaver and Emily Richardson made a contribution to the third Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference entitled “Ordering is not ranking: A study of ordinals vs. degree modifiers in nested definites”. The slides are here.
Prof. Coppock gave a talk at the Hungarian Research Center for Linguistics in May, entitled “Division and distributivity: The case of Hungarian -nként”. The slides are here.
BU linguistics came in force to ACAL 55 in May 2024 at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, contributing four talks: Andre Batchelder-Schwab and Chris Collins: “Classification of Tschila” Nairan Wu: “Remnant movement and word order constraints in Khoekhoe (Nama-Damara)” Jackson Kellogg and Jonathan Barnes: “Word- and phrase-level prosodic structure in Amharic” Ying Gong and Elizabeth […]
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 […]
Ying Gong and Elizabeth Coppock have published an article in Natural Language Semantics showing the existence of degree abstraction in Mandarin. Could degree abstraction actually be a universal feature of natural language?? Even if not, we have some rock-solid arguments that degree abstraction exists in Mandarin despite previous claims to the contrary. Officially published version […]
Ying Gong and Elizabeth Coppock’s joint work on degree abstraction in Mandarin, Is Degree Abstraction a Parameter or a Universal? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese will appear in Natural Language Semantics! Abstract: Mandarin Chinese, along with Japanese, Yoruba, Moore, and Samoan, has been argued to lack ‘degree abstraction’, a configuration at LF involving lambda abstraction over […]
Ying Gong and Elizabeth Coppock will present a talk on the degree system of Moore (a Gur language spoken in Burkina Faso) at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 55) in Montreal in May 2024. Abstract:
Ousmane Cisse and Elizabeth Coppock presented their work on the Mandinka X-woo-X construction at Triple A 10: The 10th conference on the semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian languages, held this year in Postdam, Germany. See Elizabeth Coppock’s Research Page for a video of the talk!