Sabrina Sowa, a double major in Spanish & Speech and Hearing Science, is presenting her thesis project at the OSU 2021 Autumn Undergraduate Research Festival. Her thesis titled, “Some Existential Interpretations: The Role of Pitch and Duration in the English Quantity Implicature” studies how native English speakers interpret various pronunciations of the quantifier ‘some.’ In Spanish, there are two words that translate to mean ‘some’ in English: unos and algunos. This project compares the different phonetic variants in English to their counterparts in Spanish and also seeks to determine what pronunciations are more accepted when generating quantity implicatures. Implicatures refer to the assumptions we make when we hear a sentence. For example, the ‘some but not all’ implicature assumes that only a subset of the group participates in the action. All data for this project was collected remotely in light of the pandemic.

Sabrina's presentation can be viewed on the 2021 Autumn Undergraduate Research Festival website. 

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese would like to congratulate Sabrina for her excellent undergraduate thesis research as well as her graduation from Ohio State this December.