Recent News

October 4, 2023

June 3, 2021

This grammar offers a grammatical description of the Ngòló variety of Gyeli, an endangered Bantu (A80) language spoken by 4,000-5,000 "Pygmy" hunter-gatherers in southern Cameroon. It is couched in a form-to-function approach and covers all levels of language, ranging from Gyeli phonology to its information structure and complex clauses. In 2019, the grammar received the Pāṇini Award by the Association for Linguistic Typology.

December 16, 2020

"A grammar of Gyeli" is a grammatical description of the Ngòló variety of Gyeli, an endangered Bantu (A80) language spoken by 4,000-5,000 "Pygmy" hunter-gatherers in southern Cameroon. It represents one of the most comprehensive descriptions of a northwestern Bantu language. In 2019, the grammar received the Pāṇini Award by the Association for Linguistic Typology.

December 16, 2020

Congratulations to Edgar Yau (’20) for publishing a paper in the undergraduate research journal Lifespans and Styles! His paper is an investigation of variation in the use of creaky voice by journalist Sarah Koenig, and it grew out of a course paper he wrote at 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳.

December 16, 2020

In 2019, Professor Maya Abtahian received the David T. Kearns Faculty Mentoring and Teaching award as an inaugural recipient. Professor Abtahian was recognized for her work with pre-college programs in the Kearns Center, which included working with high school students and teaching summer linguistics courses on language and identity.

January 17, 2020

Asudeh on Grammar and Meaning

Linguistics professor and CLS director Ash Asudeh has an article called Grammar and Meaning in the newly published Oxford Handbook of English Grammar.

December 23, 2019

Pietraszko Paper Accepted for Publication

Linguistics faculty Asia Pietraszko’s paper with co-author Karlos Arregi (The University of Chicago), The ups and downs of head displacement, has been accepted into the journal, Linguistic Inquiry, for publication.

December 17, 2019

Grimm Colloquium Talk

Nadine Grimm invited to give colloquium talk: Grammatical tone in Bantu: Insights from Gyeli, Humboldt University Berlin, 12/17/2019.

November 1, 2019

White Receives DARPA Grant

Aaron Steven White receives DARPA grant for Decompositional Schema Induction and Prediction.

October 26, 2019

Talk at MIT

Aaron Steven White and Ellise Moon gave a talk titled The source of nonfinite temporal interpretation at NELS 50 on October 26, 2019 at MIT. Abstract: 

October 24, 2019

Invited Talk at Haskins Laboratories

Joyce McDonough, in collaboration with Jalon Begay, gave invited talk at Haskins Laboratories titled: Patterns of inflection in fusional morphology: relations between words in Navajo on 24 October.

October 16, 2019

Grimm/McNally Presentation at OASIS

Scott Grimm (91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳) and Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra): -Ing nominalizations: Implications for natural language

September 4, 2019

Grimm to Give Talk at SinFonIJA 12 Conference

Scott Grimm is giving the invited plenary talk at the Workshop on Number, Numerals and Plurality taking place during the conference in Brno, Czech Republic. The title of his talk is "Count, Non-Count and Counts: Quantitative Investigations of Countability."

September 4, 2019

Dunlap Receives ELDP Grant

Alexandrine Dunlap receives an to document the endangered Bantu language Gweno of Tanzania.

September 4, 2019

Nadine Grimm Receives Panini Award

Nadine Grimm receives the Panini Award for her "" and is an invited plenary speaker at the on September 6, 2019 in Pavia, Italy.

August 8, 2019

Maya Abtahian, an assistant professor of linguistics is one of five University faculty mentors who are the inaugural recipients of a new mentorship award from the David T. Kearns Center for Leadership and Diversity.

March 28, 2019

Welcome Asia (Joanna) Pietraszko!

The Department of Linguistics welcomes Assistant Professor Asia (Joanna) Pietraszko beginning in July 2019. Asia received her PhD from the University of Chicago (2017). Her dissertation, entitled A study of complex verbal expressions in Nbele, explores the Bantu language Nbele, which is spoken in South Africa where Pietraszko did the fieldwork for her dissertation. Her research interests include syntax and morphology and linguistic field work.

February 6, 2019

The 6th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC), Connecting Communities, Languages and Technology, will be held February 28-March 3, 2019, at the Hawaiʻi Imin International Conference Center on the campus of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. The 6th ICLDC is hosted by the Department of Linguistics and the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and is generously supported with funding from the National Science Foundation.

October 16, 2018

Scott Grimm: Invited to talk at Tübingen

Scott Grimm has been invited to talk at the workshop "Challenges to Compositionality: Mismatches between form and meaning" at the University of Tübingen on February 8-9, 2019. His talk is called “Counting Artifacts and Abstract Objects”. 

October 12, 2018

Aaron White presents the Linguistics Colloquium on "Distribution, Inference, and Event Structure", in which he examines the relationship between semantico-pragmatic properties such as representationality, preferentiality, veridicality, and factivity and selection of clauses as syntactic arguments.

October 2, 2018

Scott Grimm nominated for Carnegie Fellowship

Scott Grimm has been nominated by the 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ for the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program. From Carnegie website: "The Andrew Carnegie Fellows are an exceptional group of established and emerging scholars, journalists, public intellectuals, and authors whose work distills knowledge, enriches our culture, and equips leaders in the realms of public policy, humanities, international relations, law, and the arts."

September 30, 2018

Senior Julianne Kapner has always been fascinated by language. When she was 4 years old and a family member told her she had a big head, she responded, “it’s full of words.”

September 1, 2018

Scott Grimm Published in Language

Scott Grimm's article, "Grammatical Number and the Scale of Individuation" has been published in the September 2018 (Vol.94) issue of Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America and one of the top international peer-reviewed journals in the field.

July 1, 2018

Ash Asudeh Joins the Department of Linguistics

Ash Asudeh is our newest faculty member. He comes to the 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ from the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. His research interests include semantics, syntax, pragmatics, cognitive science, linguistic theories and grammatical architecture, and the intersection of language, logic and computation. He is currently working on a monograph, with Dr. Gianluca Giorgolo, called Enriched Meanings: Natural Language Semantics with Category Theory. It will be published by Oxford University Press.

March 8, 2018

Five undergraduates from the Department of Linguistics are semifinalists in the Fulbright U.S. Student Grant Program, the government’s flagship international educational exchange program.

January 8, 2018

Scott Grimm is an invited lecturer at the 2018 edition of the LOT Winter School in Amsterdam. His course is "Nominal Semantics and Grammatical Number"

December 14, 2017

Joyce McDonough at ISMo in Lille France

When segmentation helps. Implicative structure and morphological boundaries in the Navajo verb. S. Beniamine (Paris Diderot), O. Bonami (Paris Diderot), J. McDonough (91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳)

November 27, 2017

Aaron White NLP talk

White, A. S., , , & . (2017). Inference is Everything: Recasting Semantic Resources into a Unified Evaluation Framework. Talk presented by Kevin Duh at the Taipei, Taiwan, November 27-December 1, 2017.

November 11, 2017

Aaron White in Berlin

White, A. S. (2017). . Invited talk given at .  and . Berlin, Germany. November 10-11, 2017.

November 3, 2017

Hirzel, M., A. S. White, & J. Lidz. (2017). Biased distributions in dialogs do not shape verb learning. Poster presented at the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston University. November 3-5, 2017.

October 24, 2017

Aaron White at NELS 48

Aaron will be presenting his paper "The role of veridicality and factivity in clause selection" on October 27 at the 48th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík.

October 2, 2017

Peter Guekguezian at ICAL XI

Peter will be presenting his paper "Unmarked Locatives in Western Armenian" at the XI International Conference on Armenian Linguistics (ICAL) in Yerevan, Armenia at the National Academy of Sciences on October 4.

July 24, 2017

Aaron White to teach two courses at ESSLLI 2017 in Toulouse

Aaron will be teaching two courses at the at the University of Tolouse this week. The first is an introductory course on , and the second is an advanced course on , which he is coteaching with Kyle Rawlins (Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University).

January 24, 2017

Greg Carlson named Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America

Greg Carlson, Professor of Linguistics, Philosophy, and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Director of the Center for the Language Sciences (CLS) has been named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). As stated below, "LSA Fellows are recognized annually for their 'distinguished contributions to the discipline'. Previously inducted LSA Fellows include Noam Chomsky, William Labov, Steven Pinker and Calvert Watkins."

April 18, 2016

Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics, emeritus, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the University’s Distinguished Visiting Humanist. Chomsky, an esteemed linguist, philosopher, political commentator, and activist, will meet with students and faculty this week. In advance of his visit, Jeffrey Runner, Chair of the Department of Linguistics, and Theodore Brown, Professor of History and Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor of Public Health and Policy, talked with Chomsky about his seminal works in linguistics and politics.

April 7, 2016

Linguist David Peterson, best known for creating the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for the HBO series Game of Thrones, will discuss the craft of creating new languages at a talk April 13.

February 27, 2015

Joyce McDonough and Doug Whalen publish “Taking the Laboratory into the Field,” in the inaugural volume of the Annual Review of Linguistics

Univeristy of 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳'s own Joyce McDonough and Doug Whalen (CUNY and Yale University's Haskins Laboratories) published their review, "Taking the Laboratory into the Field," in the inagural volume (January 2015) of the Annual Review of Linguistics. For more information on the Annual Review of Linguisticvisit the publication's . 

November 21, 2013

Laurel Carney (BME) w/ Joyce McDonough awarded NIH-NIDCD "Auditory Processing of Complex Sounds"

recieved a renewal for another five years for her NIH-NIDCD grant entitled "Auditory Processing of COmplex Sounds." The new emphasis for the next five years is to investigate neuroal coding of speech sounds, startiing with vowels. This new direction is possible thanks to the collaboration with Professor Joyce McDonough from the Linguistics Department. This grant will support graduate students and a post-doc in BME, Linguistics, or related fields who are interested in speech coding in the brain.

July 29, 2013

Solviega Armsokaite joins Linguistics Faculty

Solviega ArmsokaiteSolviega Armsokaite joins the Department of Linguistics as Visiting Assistant Professor for the AY 2013-2014.  Dr. Armoskaite received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, 2011. She will be teaching LIN110 Introduction to Linguistic Analysis and LIN101 People and Their Languages in Fall 2013.

July 27, 2013

Sasha Eloi as adjunct lecturer in Linguistics

We are pleased to announce that Ms. Sasha Eloi will join the faculty in Linguistics for the AY 2013-2014 as an adjunct lecturer. She will teach LIN110 Introduction to Linguistic Analysis in the fall and LIN162 Modern African-Amercian English Grammar in the spring. Ms. Eloi is a graduate of 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ and Syracuse University with degrees in Linguistics. 

May 19, 2013

Class of 2013

We extend our congratulations to all of our students who are graduating this year. Their names are listed below.

February 3, 2012

How Many Tasmanian Languages Were There?

Claire BowernThe languages of Tasmania have been something of an enigma. The data are difficult to work with; they were recorded from multiple speakers in multiple locations, with little accompanying analysis. They are non-phonemic and recorded by non-speakers of the languages (and in the absence of other phonemically recorded data they are difficult to interpret). We are unsure currently of how many languages were spoken in Tasmania at the time of European settlement, how many groups (or families) they fall into, and how those groups should be subgrouped.

March 1, 2011

Decisions, decisions: Linguists Gregory Carlson and Julie Sedivy '97 (PhD) examine the ways we make decisions—and how advertisers exploit those processes—in their new book, Sold on Language.