News
Exciting things are always afoot.
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.
Two fall UROP awards!
LiSLab is excited to welcome Varun Malikayil, a Junior in Computer Engineering, and Pamela Sugrue, senior in Linguistics, who have both won UROP awards for fall 2018! Varun will be working on an eye-tracking study involving complex noun phrases, and Pamela will be working on experimental and field methods for studying gradable adjectives.
Congrats and welcome, Varun and Pamela!
Paper accepted for presentation at Sorting Out Definiteness 2019
2018 Summer UROP student Miriam Yifrach will have an opportunity present her findings at a workshop entitled Sorting Out Definiteness, to take place in Bremen in March 2019.
Go Miriam!
Abstract accepted for presentation at Linguistic Society of America
Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten and Elizabeth Coppock will be presented a paper entitled "No individual comparison in Navajo: Evidence from quantificational standards" at the 2019 LSA Meeting in New York!
Keynote at “Language in Quantity and Thought”
In August 2018, Elizabeth Coppock will be a keynote speaker at Language in Quantity and Thought, a workshop to take place in conjunction with ESSLLI 2018 in Sofia, Bulgaria. She will present her joint work with Eli Ganem on verification strategies for proportional quantifiers.
Poster at SALT 28 @ MIT
Elizabeth Coppock and Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten had an opportunity to present their work on quantity superlatives at SALT 28, right across the river at MIT.
Our poster was rather pretty if we may say so ourselves. Download it here:
UROP Humanities Scholars Award to Elias Ganem
Elias Ganem's summer UROP project was highly ranked by the evaluation committee, qualifying him for a UROP Humanities Scholars Award. This award provides $500 in student supplies and/or travel support for him, in addition to $1000 in research funding for the lab. Go Eli!
UROP awards to Elias Ganem and Miriam Yifrach
Boston University's UROP program has generously agreed to fund two exciting summer projects!
Elias Ganem: Cross-linguistic experimental investigations of fragile superlative readings
In this project, we will carry out experiments probing the meaning of proportional quantifiers such as “most” in several different languages. The goal is to determine whether the “fragile superlative reading” that has been detected for English exists in languages where proportional quantifiers differ from English in their morphological structure.
Miriam Yifrach: Defining definiteness in Turoyo
In this project, we will carry out an investigation of definiteness-marking in Turoyo, an endangered Semitic language, based on interviews with native speakers. The goals are to determine where definiteness-marking lies on the spectrum from “weak” to “strong", and to characterize the circumstances under which definiteness-marking is used in combination with quantificational expressions.