Linguistics

Linguistics at BU enables students to study human language from various perspectives and consider the relationships between linguistics and other disciplines. Our academic programs offer training in linguistic theory and analysis and include a wide range of courses examining the biological, social, cultural, historical, and cognitive bases of language.

News

Faculty

Michael Everdell co-authors a paper in Glossa

July 14th, 2025

Visiting Professor Michael Everdell co-authored a new publication in Glossa: "Verbhood and state/change of state lability across languages" https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/10003/

Dissertation

Ousmane Cisse defends his dissertation prospectus

June 5th, 2025

Last month, PhD candidate Ousmane Cisse successfully defended his dissertation prospectus! His dissertation is based on the preliminary results of his second qualifying paper (QP2). As part of this work, he is investigating graphemic variations in the representation of engma and their sociolinguistic implications in Casamance Mandinka Ajami. His data is from the NEH Mandinka […]

Conferences

Michael Everdell presents at SALT

May 28th, 2025

Professor Michael Everdell and his colleague Prerna Nadathur presented a popular poster at the SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory) conference! You can view their handout on Mike's website: https://michael-everdell.github.io/files/SALT35_handout_2025.pdf

Dissertation

Liza Sulkin defends her dissertation prospectus

May 27th, 2025

Congratulations to PhD candidate Liza Sulkin who defended her dissertation prospectus! A prospectus is a preliminary description of a proposed dissertation. Her dissertation work investigates how F0, CoG of /s/, and speech rate correlate with gender presentation and sexuality for a group of women and assigned female at birth (AFAB) non-binary (NB) people.

Conferences

BU Ling at ACAL 2025

May 23rd, 2025

Four BU Ling members (and an alum!) presented at The Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) this month! Pictured left to right is Ousmane Cisse, Romi Hill, Rebecca Bonney, and Jackson Kellogg.

Sociolinguistics

Kevin Samejon accepts tenure-track position

May 22nd, 2025

After receiving his PhD this month, Kevin Samejon has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in Sociolinguistics at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He will be joining their English department in the Fall of 2025!

Journals & publications

Work on VO compound morphology by Vasilis Michos

May 21st, 2025

PhD student Vasilis Michos' work on VO compound morphology is now printed as part of a proceedings volume! You can read his work at https://ins.web.auth.gr/images/MEG_PLIRI/MEG_44_187_201.pdf

Computational Linguistics

Najoung Kim selected as keynote speaker

May 20th, 2025

Professor Najoung Kim was chosen as a keynote speaker for the 10th Workshop on Representation Learning for NL (RepL4NLP 2025)! The event took place in early May and her talk was titled "What does it take to convince ourselves that a system is exhibiting compositionality?" You can read more about the conference at RepL4NLP 2025. […]

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