Elizabeth Coppock

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Researcher in Linguistics, University of Gothenburg

Elizabeth Coppock received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2009, and became
Docent of General Linguistics in 2013 at the University of Gothenburg, where she is currently
affiliated.Prior to this, she held research and teaching positions at Lund University and Heinrich-Heine-
Universität Düsseldorf. With a primary focus on formal semantics and pragmatics, she is interested in
what sort of logics (dynamic, inquisitive, indexical etc.) might be adequate for capturing aspects of
natural language, and what light can be shed on this by phenomena such as definiteness, quantification,
focus, measurement and comparison, indexicality, statements of opinion, and egophoricity.

Her recent publications include ‘Definiteness and Determinacy’, co-authored with David Beaver and
published in Linguistics and Philosophy (2015); ‘Quasi-Definites in Swedish: Elative Superlatives and
Emphatic Assertion’, co-authored with Elisabet Engdahl and published in Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory (2015); ‘Raising and Resolving Issues with Scalar Modifiers’, co-authored with
Thomas Brochhagen and published in Semantics and Pragmatics (2013); ‘Principles of the Exclusive
Muddle’, co-authored with David Beaver and published in Journal of Semantics (2013); and ‘A
Semantic Solution to the Problem of Hungarian Object Agreement’, published in Natural Language
Semantics (2013).

Through the Pro Futura program, Coppock aims to categorize the various ‘channels’ through which
meaning can be expressed in language: entailment, presupposition, implicature, their subtypes, and
beyond. As of January 2016, she is also the project leader for a broad cross-linguistic study on
superlatives funded by the Swedish Research Council, focussing particularly on superlatives of
quantity (“most”, “the most”) and their equivalents in a diverse sample of languages.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2018-19.