Faculty

Kate Lindsey to present at SLE

Professor Kate Lindsey was accepted to present at Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) in August. Her presentation is titled “Exploring Reality-Refuting Particles: The Multifunctionality of Ende Ka and Areal Parallels in Komnzo and Idi”.   Many congrats to Professor Lindsey!

Professor Coppock presents at SOLID Georgetown

Professor Coppock presented with Law Professor Jill Anderson (University of Connecticut) last Friday at a one-day symposium on legal interpretation and data (“SOLID”) at Georgetown. https://solid-symposium.github.io/2025/ They presented a talk entitled “‘Any’ problems: Lexical Vagueness or Structural Ambiguity?”.

Jenna Conklin accepts post-doc position at the Arctic University of Norway

Jenna Conklin, one of our visiting assistant professors, recently accepted a post-doc position at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT). She will be working with Martin Krämer to use artificial grammar learning to better map the typology of vowel and consonant harmony. You can learn more about Martin’s work on the university’s website. Congratulations, Jenna!!

Professor Neil Myler presents at a CRISSP seminar

This month, Professor Neil Myler presented at the CRISSP (Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology) seminar on Theme Vowels, Categories, and Categorization. His talk was titled “Romance Conjugation Class Features could be Syntactic (and on certain assumptions must be)” If you couldn’t make it, he also did a debrief that you can watch […]

Beware of referential garden paths! The dangerous allure of semantic parses that succeed locally but globally fail

Professor Elizabeth Coppock, along with several of her colleagues, has published a new paper! Title: Beware of referential garden paths! The dangerous allure of semantic parses that succeed locally but globally fail URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9q353 Abstract: A central endeavor in psycholinguistic research has been to determine the processing profile of syntactically ambiguous strings. Previous work investigating […]

2025 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) talks and posters

BU Linguistics is proud to announce that several members of our department are presenting at the 2025 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting in January! Talks: Robert Bayley, Xinye Zhang, Daniel Erker, Rafael Orozco and Gregory Guy: Subject pronoun expression and heritage languages: The effects of language and dialect contact. ADS Morphosyntax session, January […]

2024 Appellate Judges Education Institute (AJEI) Summit

Professor Elizabeth Coppock presented alongside UConn law professor Jill Anderson at the 2024 Appellate Judges Education Institute (AJEI) Summit. As a semanticist, Professor Coppock explained how negation interacts with words like “a”, “all”, “and”, and “or” to produce an ambiguity between what linguists call “full negation” and “partial negation”. The professors expanded on how their […]