(1) {Liz, Lizzie} (Coppock) (2) Elizabeth (Edwards) Coppock (3) *{Liz, Lizzie} Edwards Coppock (4) *Edwards (Coppock) [LFG solution]

About me

Since 2002, I have been a Ph.D. student in the Stanford Linguistics Department. I graduated from Northwestern University that same year, with a BA in Linguistics. More information of this nature is contained in my CV (pdf).

As former Stanford linguistics grad student Luis Casillas once said when asked to state his interests: "I'm interested in grammar." I am also interested in how it could be acquired (learnability) and how it is deployed in language production and comprehension. Have I left anything out?

My thesis is concerned with the learnability problem that arises from the supposed existence of arbitrary, lexically idiosyncratic exceptions to productive patterns. For a range of phenomena in which it has been claimed that there are such exceptions, I argue that under a more careful analysis, the data can be given a principled explanation. My working title is The Logical and Empirical Foundations of Baker's Paradox.

I am also a pathological singer. I currently sing soprano in the California Bach Society, the grooviest baroque choral ensemble in the Bay Area. Here is one of the solos that they allowed me to sing (God's Tender Mercy, Handel). I take voice lessons with divine goddess Amy Schneider. In Dead Tongues (not THE Dead Tongues, just Dead Tongues), the Unofficial Rock and Roll band of the Stanford Linguistics Department, I have had the opportunity to try out more recent genres.

My email address is my last name at stanford dot edu.

Papers

Under review. Parallel Grammatical Encoding of Alternative Conceptualizations. The latest version of my work on syntactic blends, cut down to 3000 words with figures and tables inserted.

2007. Toward a True Theory of the Periphery: Why Culicover's 'Odd Prepositions' Aren't That Odd. Presented at BLS 2007. For each of the prepositions argued by Culicover (1999) to vary idiosyncratically along certain dimensions, I show that the behavior is derivable from more general principles. This removes the argument based on prepositions for the "Conservative Attentive Learner."

2006. ISIS: It's Not Disfluent, but How Do We Know That? Presented at BLS 2006. Using acoustic analysis of a large sample of "is is" tokens from the Switchboard database, we show that canonical instances of the ISIS construction resemble fluent speech acoustically.

2006 (handout). Object-control promise. Presented at LSA Annual Meeting, 2006. This paper argues in favor of Farkas's notion of responsibility as crucial to determining controller choice, rather than lexical selection.

2005. Alignment in Syntactic Blending. My second qualifying paper at Stanford (chair: Dan Jurafsky). Presented at "Workshop on Slips of the Tongue: The State of the Art in Speech Error Research" in Boston, MA, July 30th. Argues for a process of alignment in the production of syntactic blends, which is sensitive to part of speech.

2005 (ms). Face-saving strategies in telephone conversation endings. The face-threatening nature of parting is shown to underlie the various strategies used by conversational participants in the Switchboard corpus. Also, here is a powerpoint presentation on my work on this project last summer (with Jacob Bien).

2004 (ms). Object Agreement in Hungarian. My first qualifying paper at Stanford, slightly abridged (chair: Joan Bresnan). Presented at the LFG04 conference in lovely Christchurch, New Zealand in 2004, not submitted to the proceedings. Concerns the conditions under which verbal definiteness marking occurs in Hungarian, and how it relates to accusative case assignment. The material that doesn't contribute directly to the point has been moved to the appendices.

2003. Sometimes it's hard to be Coherent. In the proceedings of the LFG03 conference. Argues for an LFG-Optimality Theoretic approach to a puzzling pattern of variation with respect to case-marking in Hungarian focus-raising constructions. The analysis treats the LFG notion of Coherence as a violable constraint.

2002 (ms). The origins of the double-is construction in English (e.g. The problem is, is that). With Laura Staum. We argue that the second is is a grammaticalized focus particle.

2002 (ms). Creativity, Generative Grammar, and Erzeugung. Squib for the class "Foundations of Linguistic Theory" taught by Paul Kiparsky. Compares Chomsky's notion of generativity with Humboldt's notion, erzeugung, as approaches to the creativity of language.

2001. Gapping: In Defense of Deletion. In Proceedings of the 37th annual Chicago Linguistic Society conference (Main session). Argues for a traditional (Sag 1976) deletion treatment of Gapping (e.g. "Some like comedy, and others romance."), against an alternative proposal by Kyle Johnson (1996), involving Across-The-Board movement.