One of the premier journals in linguistics, Language Learning, offers a grant to support doctoral student research. PhD student Fang Shaohua was selected as recipient based on his dissertation work, "Quantifier scope in L2 learners: interpretation, processing, and acquisition."
Shaohua's topic requires mastery of complex argumentation with logical representation, abstract syntax, and experimental psycholinguistics. Specifically, he will investigate the interpretation of sentences such as ‘Every horse didn’t jump the fence’. This sentence is ambiguous in English (‘none of the horses jumped over the fence ‘or ‘only some of them did’), but not in Chinese. This fact sets up interesting questions about the nature of L2 grammars.
Congratulations, Shaohua!