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!
Danielle Dionne and Elizabeth Coppock have published a paper in Glossa Psycholinguistics entitled “Complexity vs. salience of alternatives in implicature: A cross-linguistic investigation”. See it live and open access here! https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gh7r8g7
Two of our amazing PhD students presented at the 51st Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics in Leiden: Okrah Oppong, “Possession and inalienability In Ɔkere” Ousmane Cisse, “Reduplicated Distributivity and its interaction with negation and aspect in Mandinka” https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2022/08/colloquium-on-african-languages-and-linguistics-2022
Ying Gong and Andre Batchelder-Schwab have received funding for a project, titled “Fieldwork on Ersu and Yi language in Southwest China” from the East and Inner Asia Council (EIAC), with the support of the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation (CCKF). This fieldwork focuses on two under-studied Tibeto-Burman languages–Ersu (a Qiangic language) and Nuosu Yi (a Lolo-Burmese language)–which […]
Professor Coppock’s contribution to a special volume of Glossa on “non-conservativity with precise proportions” edited by Uli Sauerland and Robert Pasternak is now out! Although “percent” got famous for its non-conservative uses as in “The committee hired 30% WOMEN”, Coppock argues that we should approach the analysis of “percent” via simpler, predicative cases like “The […]