Recent News





"A grammar of Gyeli" by Nadine Grimm, assistant professor of linguistics

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.

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Congratulations Edgar Yau!

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 Rochester.

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Pietraszko Paper Accepted for Publication

December 23, 2019

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.

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Grimm Colloquium Talk

December 17, 2019

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

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Welcome Asia (Joanna) Pietraszko!

March 28, 2019

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.

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International Conference on LD&C 2019

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.

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Scott Grimm: Invited to talk at Tübingen

October 16, 2018

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”. 

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Aaron White: Invited talk at Stanford

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.

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Scott Grimm nominated for Carnegie Fellowship

October 2, 2018

Scott Grimm has been nominated by the University of Rochester 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."

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Scott Grimm Published in Language

September 1, 2018

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.

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Ash Asudeh Joins the Department of Linguistics

July 1, 2018

Ash Asudeh is our newest faculty member. He comes to the University of Rochester 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.

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Aaron White at NELS 48

October 24, 2017

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.

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Peter Guekguezian at ICAL XI

October 2, 2017

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.

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Greg Carlson named Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America

January 24, 2017

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."

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Conversations on linguistics and politics with Noam Chomsky

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.

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Q&A: The man who invented Dothraki

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.

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

February 27, 2015

Univeristy of Rochester'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 website

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

November 21, 2013

Professor Laurel Carney 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.

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Sasha Eloi as adjunct lecturer in Linguistics

July 27, 2013

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 University of Rochester and Syracuse University with degrees in Linguistics. 

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Class of 2013

May 19, 2013

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

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How Many Tasmanian Languages Were There?

February 3, 2012

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.

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