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

Students

Romi Hill presents at WOLF lab

April 27th, 2025

Earlier this month, PhD student Romi Hill presented at Harvard's WOLF (Working on Language in the Field) lab! Her talk was on reduplication in Bantu.

Conferences

Kate Lindsey to present at SLE

April 22nd, 2025

Professor Kate Lindsey was accepted to present at Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) in August. Her presentation is titled "Exploring Reality-Refuting Particles: The Multifunctionality of Ende Ka and Areal Parallels in Komnzo and Idi". Many congrats to Professor Lindsey!

Students

Beck Nowicki accepts PhD offer at Binghamtom University

April 11th, 2025

Our master’s student Rebecca (Beck) Nowicki has officially committed to a PhD at another BU—Binghamton University that is! Congratulations to Beck and we wish her good luck in her future endeavors.

Dissertation

Kevin Samejon and Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas defend their dissertations

April 8th, 2025

Very exciting news this week: two of our PhD candidates defended their dissertations! - Kevin Samejon: "National identity and regionality among Philippine English speakers in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu: A variationist study of alveolar fricative production" - Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas: Covariation & Salience in Linguistic Contact: A Sociophonetic Study of Liquid Production in Boston Spanish" […]

Conferences

Becca Wheeler poster talk at ICLDC

March 20th, 2025

In early March, several BU Linguistics members presented at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC) in Hawai'i. Pictured here, PhD student Becca Wheeler had a very popular poster talk titled "Inupiaq: a case study in passive standardization in revitalization." Her project was borne out of Prof. O'Connor's course on Language Revitalization. […]

Sociolinguistics

Ousmane Cisse presents at the 25th Sociolinguistic Symposium (SOSY)

March 18th, 2025

PhD candidate Ousmane Cisse's abstract titled "The Graphemic Variation of /ŋ/ and Its Sociolinguistic Implications in Casamance Mandinka Ajami," was accepted at the 25th Sociolinguistic Symposium (SOSY). His presentation was earlier this month at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Congrats to Ousmane on the great achievement!

Conferences

Professor Coppock presents at SOLID Georgetown

March 16th, 2025

Professor Coppock presented with Law Professor Jill Anderson (University of Connecticut) last Friday at a one-day symposium on legal interpretation and data ("SOLID") at Georgetown. https://solid-symposium.github.io/2025/ They presented a talk entitled "'Any' problems: Lexical Vagueness or Structural Ambiguity?".

Journals & publications

Romi Hill published in Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG)

March 10th, 2025

PhD student Romi Hill was recently published in the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) conference proceedings. She, along with her colleagues during her master's degree at Konstanz University in Germany, propose a method to integrate gradient language redundancy effects into a formal generative model of grammar. You can read the paper here: https://lfg-proceedings.org/lfg/index.php/main/article/view/60

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