News
Exciting things are always afoot.
LiSLab represents at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 3
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 presents in Budapest
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.
Boston University represents at ACAL 55!
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 Coppock: "No need for the Degree Abstraction Parameter in Mooré" (slides)
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:
Gong & Coppock publish in Natural Language Semantics!
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 at Natural Language Semantics here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11050-023-09217-w
Here is a link to the accepted manuscript (no paywall).
Paper on Degree Abstraction in Mandarin accepted at Natural Language Semantics!
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 a degree variable. These languages are claimed to have a negative setting for a hypothesized 'Degree Abstraction Parameter'. Recent work, however, has argued for degree abstraction in Japanese and Yoruba, and degree abstraction has been detected in a number of additional languages. Could it in fact be universal? Here, we focus on the case of Mandarin, and argue that Mandarin has degree abstraction too. We offer three arguments in favor of degree abstraction in Mandarin, based on attributive comparatives, comparatives with embedded predicates, and scope interactions with modals. We also rebut prior arguments for the lack of degree abstraction in Mandarin, considering degree questions, measure phrases, and negative island effects. Taken together, these results show that degree abstraction is not a parameter along which Mandarin and English vary, and suggest rather that degree abstraction may be universally available.
Paper on Moore to be presented at ACAL 2024
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 present at Triple A 2023
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!
Dionne & Coppock published in Glossa Psycholinguistics!
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
Okrah Oppong and Ousmane Cisse present at the 51st Colloquium on African Linguistics
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"