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 […]
Prof. Coppock delivers keynote address at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024
Prof. Coppock was among the keynote speakers at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024. Her talk was entitled “Metrology and Mereology”. Download the slides from the talk here. Here is the abstract: This talk is about metrology and mereology. Of these, the latter is more familiar to formal semanticist, and, in conjunction with event semantics, has been of use in […]
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 […]
Jupitara Ray defends her dissertation prospectus
Congratulations to PhD student Jupitara Ray on successfully defending her dissertation prospectus! Her project is entitled “Phonetic accommodation and drift: A study of Hindi-English and Telugu-English early sequential bilinguals”. You can read more about Jupitara and her work on her website: https://jupitararay.github.io/
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 […]
Professor Neil Myler in “Continua” journal
Congrats to BU Linguistics Professor Neil Myler who just published the FIRST paper in a new journal called “Continua”. His paper is titled: “Imagining Life without Rules of Exponence and the Elsewhere Condition”. You can read the paper and learn more about the journal on the Continua website.
Shaked Gabbay presenting on Ladino
Congrats to student Shaked Gabbay who presented her work on Ladino to Northeastern University! Her talk was entitled “Documenting and creating learning materials for a dying language, the special case of Ladino”.
Journal article co-authored by Professor Daniel G. Erker and PhD student Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas
The department is excited to share that a new journal article co-authored by Professor Daniel G. Erker and PhD candidate Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas has been published in Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics! DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2024-2010Congrats to Lee-Ann and Danny!
NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation)
BU represented at the 52nd annual NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation)!From left to right: Chris Lee, Lee-Ann Vidal Covas, Danielle Dionne (alumna), Kevin SamejonChris Lee: “Regional variation among Standard Mandarin listeners’ perceptual cue weighting for prosodic focus marking: Comparing Beijing, Jilu, and Zhongyuan Mandarin”Lee-Ann Vidal Covas: “How Salience Influences Dialectal Persistence and Covariation: Insights from […]
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference
BU Linguistics was well-represented at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference! Aditya Yedetore and Najoung Kim presented a poster titled “Semantic Training Signals Promote Hierarchical Syntactic Generalizations in Transformers”. Professor Najoung Kim, along with two of her colleagues, also won Best Paper Award at the GenBench workshop! You can read their paper […]