Najoung Kim selected as keynote speaker
Professor Najoung Kim was chosen as a keynote speaker for the 10th Workshop on Representation Learning for NL (RepL4NLP 2025)! The event took place in early May and her talk was titled “What does it take to convince ourselves that a system is exhibiting compositionality?” You can read more about the conference at RepL4NLP 2025. […]
MorphoMO workshop in Montreal
At the beginning of May, Professor Neil Myler presented at MorphoMO, a workshop in Montreal. His talk was titled “The Spanish PYTA morphome dissolved”. He writes, “Many Romance languages exhibit a morphomic pattern dubbed PYTA (for {perfecto/pretérito} y tiempos afines—see especially Maiden 2018: Ch 4). Spanish exhibits a striking instance of this phenomenon. No matter […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]