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.
Congratulations to PhD student Jupitara Ray on successfully defending her dissertation prospectus! Her project is entitled "Phonetic accommodation and drift: A study of Hindi-English and Telugu-English early sequential bilinguals". You can read more about Jupitara and her work on her website: https://jupitararay.github.io/
Professor Elizabeth Coppock presented alongside UConn law professor Jill Anderson at the 2024 Appellate Judges Education Institute (AJEI) Summit. As a semanticist, Professor Coppock explained how negation interacts with words like "a", "all", "and", and "or" to produce an ambiguity between what linguists call "full negation" and "partial negation". The professors expanded on how their […]
Congrats to BU Linguistics Professor Neil Myler who just published the FIRST paper in a new journal called "Continua". His paper is titled: "Imagining Life without Rules of Exponence and the Elsewhere Condition". You can read the paper and learn more about the journal on the Continua website.
Congrats to student Shaked Gabbay who presented her work on Ladino to Northeastern University! Her talk was entitled "Documenting and creating learning materials for a dying language, the special case of Ladino".
The department is excited to share that a new journal article co-authored by Professor Daniel G. Erker and PhD candidate Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas has been published in Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics! DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2024-2010Congrats to Lee-Ann and Danny!
BU represented at the 52nd annual NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation)!From left to right: Chris Lee, Lee-Ann Vidal Covas, Danielle Dionne (alumna), Kevin SamejonChris Lee: "Regional variation among Standard Mandarin listeners’ perceptual cue weighting for prosodic focus marking: Comparing Beijing, Jilu, and Zhongyuan Mandarin"Lee-Ann Vidal Covas: "How Salience Influences Dialectal Persistence and Covariation: Insights from […]
BU Linguistics was well-represented at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference! Aditya Yedetore and Najoung Kim presented a poster titled "Semantic Training Signals Promote Hierarchical Syntactic Generalizations in Transformers". Professor Najoung Kim, along with two of her colleagues, also won Best Paper Award at the GenBench workshop! You can read their paper […]
After linguist Philip Tama made recordings in 2012 of Taeme (a Pahoturi River language), Professor Kate Lindsey and student Brady Dailey compiled and cleaned the dataset. The recordings are now public in the PARADISEC archive! Without their efforts, this dataset would have remained inaccessible. Now, the Taeme community and researchers have access to this important […]