Recent News
Lots of Rochester Representation at ACAL56
This weekend, the University of Minnesota will host the 56th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), a premier gathering for scholars and researchers in the field. We're proud to share that the University of Rochester will be well represented, with several faculty, graduate students, and alumni attending and presenting their work. It’s an exciting opportunity to showcase our research, connect with colleagues, and contribute to the ongoing conversations shaping the study of African languages. The presenters include:
Undergraduate Sophomore, Lia Polster, Wins Scholarship
A sophomore linguistics major, Lia Polster, has been awarded a Critical Language Scholarship to study Swahili.
Jeremy Coburn and four PhD students attended PHUNY2 conference
On Saturday, Jeremy Coburn, Bryan Isaac, Meghna Hooda, Joseph Oluwasegun, and Yizhen Ma attended the Second Annual Meeting of Phonetics/Phonology of Upstate New York (PHUNY 2) at the University at Buffalo. PHUNY is a workshop intended for graduate students in all parts of Upstate New York working on any aspect of phonetics and/or phonology. It is a small and friendly workshop with a single-stream, one-day format. In addition to discussing research, the goal is to build community and provide a venue for practicing conference skills.
Jeremy Coburn featured on IN THE BUSH podcast
Visiting Assistant Professor Jeremy Coburn recently appeared as a guest on the IN THE BUSH podcast, joining hosts Cole and Joel for an in-depth conversation about his research on the Hadzabe people of Tanzania. Drawing on his expertise in African languages, Coburn discussed the unique features of the Hadza language, one of the few languages in the world that uses complex click consonants, and the broader cultural and environmental challenges facing the Hadzabe community today.
Joyce McDonough to present at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Joyce McDonough will present a talk titled “Phonetic Wherewithal" at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Friday, April 25, 2025.
Jeremy Coburn to present at Syracuse University
Jeremy Coburn will present a talk titled “Flexibility in Fieldwork: Community-Focused Approaches to Linguistic Research" at Syracuse University on Friday, April 25, 2025.
Nadine Grimm gave a talk at Boston University
Nadine Grimm gave talk titled "A typology of grammatical tone in northwestern Bantu" at Boston University.
Undergraduate Senior, Daniel Pyskaty, to present at ASA 2025
Daniel Pyskaty, an undergraduate senior majoring in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics, was accepted to present at the Acoustical Society of America in May 2025. The research he'll present, "Vowel Dispersion: Nonlinearities of the Auditory Pathway Constrain the Cross-Linguistic Structure of Vowel Systems" is a joint project with Daniel Guest, Douglas Schwarz, Joyce McDonough, and Laurel Carney.
PEER 2025 workshop to be held on Friday, April 18, 2025
The 4th Workshop on Processing and Evaluating Event Representations (PEER2025) will be held at the University of Rochester on April 18, 2025, with invited talks by Ellen Lau (University of Maryland, College Park) and Alexis Wellwood (University of Southern California). If you plan to attend in person, we ask that you please register here.
Chihsheng Jin and Audrey Stenger to present at the department's Annual Master's and Senior Honors Presentations event
Chihsheng Jin will present his MS essay on Cross-document Event Extraction with LLMs. Audrey Stenger will present her senior honors thesis. A reception with snacks and drinks will follow the event in the Department of Linguistics.
Nadine Grimm gave a talk at Southern Oregon University
Nadine Grimm gave talk titled "Adventures in travel: Cameroon" at Southern Oregon University.
Suganya Schmura presented at ICLDC9
Suganya Schmura, 3rd year PhD student, presented a paper titled "From polyglossia to ethnic identity: language and identity in the Malayalee diaspora" at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC9), on March 6-9, 2025 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, Hawaii. This work is a collaborative project with Associate Professor, Maya Abtahian.
Scott Grimm presented at ICLDC 9
Scott Grimm presented at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC 9), which was held on March 6-9, 2025 at the University of Hawai’i in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Scott was co-author on a talk titled “Conducting fieldwork using MobileLinguist: A mobile app for data collection and language resource development."
Maya Abtahian presented at GURT 2025
Maya Abtahian, Associate Professor, presented a paper titled "Do you say chai, chaya, or tea? Language, food, and ethnic identity" at the 2025 Georgetown University Round Table (GURT 2025), on February 28-March 2, 2025 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
J.C. Wamsley presented at the Texas Linguistics Society
J.C. Wamsley presented a poster titled "The Pragmatic Distribution of Personal Pronouns in Falam Chin" at the Texas Linguistics Society (TLS2025), on February 21, 2025.
J.C. Wamsley presented at 13th International Conference of the North East Indian Linguistics Society
J.C. Wamsley presented a paper titled "The Distribution of Personal Pronouns in Falam Chin: A Pragmatic Analysis" at the 13th International Conference of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS13), on February 7, 2025 at Nagaland University, Kohima.
Maya Abtahian and J. Kapner presented at the LSA Annual Meeting
Maya Abtahian, Associate Professor, and J. Kapner, UR alum, presented a paper titled "Oral histories for community-engaged sociolinguistics: Insights from the 19th Ward" at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting (LSA 2025), on January 9-12, 2025 in Philadelphia, PA.
Jeremy Coburn, Visiting Assistant Professor, contributes to National Geographic docuseries
We’re excited to share that Jeremy Coburn, Visiting Assistant Professor, contributed his linguistic expertise to a National Geographic docuseries, Superskilled with Eva zu Beck. In the episode highlighting the Hadza people of Tanzania, Jeremy provided transcription and translation for Hadza dialogue. His work is credited at the 33:52 mark in the episode, which is now available to view on YouTube and below.
Ash Asudeh presented to the 1st Eurasian Congress of Linguists
Ash Asudeh presented a talk titled "Distributed Morphology without Movement, Fusional Morphology without Paradigms" to the 1st Eurasian Congress of Linguists on December 11, 2024.
C.M. Downey presented at EMNLP 2024
C.M. Downey presented a talk titled "Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families" at 2024 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference on November 12, 2024.
Maya Abtahian and Suganya Schmura presented at NWAV52
Maya Abtahian, Associate Professor, and Suganya Schmura, 3rd year PhD student, presented a paper titled "Desi and the development of ethnic identity" at the 52nd New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV52), on November 7-9, 2024 at Florida International University and University of Miami.
Mary Moroney presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 29
Mary Moroney presented a talk titled "Question word distributivity" at Sinn und Bedeutung 29 on September 18, 2024.
Nadine Grimm jointly appointed as James P. Wilmot Assistant Professor
Nadine Grimm, an assistant professor of linguistics, has been jointly appointed as the James P. Wilmot Assistant Professor.
Now accepting Working Papers submissions for Spring 2024
Becky Everson's fieldwork corpus on Shekgalagadi is live!
Joyce McDonough jointly appointed as Richard L. Turner Professor
Joyce McDonough, a professor of linguistics, has been jointly appointed as the Richard L. Turner Professor.
Professor Nadine Grimm receives 2023 Bloomfield Award from LSA
Professor Nadine Grimm has been awarded the 2023 Bloomfield Award from the Linguistic Society of America. A single award is made annually to recognize "a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics.”
"A grammar of Gyeli" by Nadine Grimm, assistant professor of linguistics
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.
A new publication by Nadine Grimm, assistant professor of linguistics, will soon be available
"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.
Congratulations Edgar Yau!
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.
These mentors make a difference for first-generation, minority students
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.
Enriched Meanings: Natural Language Semantics with Category Theory
Ash Asudeh, professor of linguistics and director of the Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester, has a new book that just came out!
In Solidarity with Scholar Strike
We invite the University of Rochester community to join the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies (FDI) and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies (SBAI) in two days of solidarity with our city, our coworkers, and our students through the nationwide Scholar Strike/Teach-In to protest state violence and racial injustice on September 8 and 9, 2020.
Pietraszko—The coming apart of case and focus in Bantu
Linguistics faculty Asia Pietraszko’s paper The coming apart of case and focus in Bantu, has been accepted into the journal, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, for publication.
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.
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.
Grimm Colloquium Talk
Nadine Grimm invited to give colloquium talk: Grammatical tone in Bantu: Insights from Gyeli, Humboldt University Berlin, 12/17/2019.
Scott Grimm and Peter Guekguezian: Plurality and Determinancy in Western Armenian
NaP2019 – Number and plurality: cross-linguistic variation in the nominal domain (University of Goettingen)
White Receives DARPA Grant
Aaron Steven White receives DARPA grant for Decompositional Schema Induction and Prediction.
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: https://nels50.mit.edu/sites/default/files/abstracts/353-MoonWhite_0.pdf
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. https://haskinslabs.org/staff-talks-archive
Grimm/McNally Presentation at OASIS
Scott Grimm (University of Rochester) and Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra): -Ing nominalizations: Implications for natural language
Presentations at NWAV48 Conference in Eugene, OR
All abstracts for NWAV48 presentations can be found here: https://nwav48.uoregon.edu/program/
Presentation at Institute of Linguistics
Ash Asudeh. Richard Redux. Presented at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota.
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 SinFonIJA 12 conference in Brno, Czech Republic. The title of his talk is "Count, Non-Count and Counts: Quantitative Investigations of Countability."
Dunlap Receives ELDP Grant
Alexandrine Dunlap receives an ELDP grant to document the endangered Bantu language Gweno of Tanzania.
Nadine Grimm Receives Panini Award
Nadine Grimm receives the Panini Award for her "Grammar of Gyeli" and is an invited plenary speaker at the 13th ALT Conference on September 6, 2019 in Pavia, Italy.
Mentors make a difference for first-generation, minority students
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.
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.
International Conference on LD&C 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.
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”.
Aaron White: Invited talk at Stanford
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.
Scott Grimm nominated for Carnegie Fellowship
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."
Kapner enriches Rochester community through linguistics
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.”
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.
Ash Asudeh Joins the Department of Linguistics
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.
5 linguistics students named Fulbright semifinalists
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.
Scott Grimm at LOT Winter School
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"
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 (University of Rochester)
Queenette Okwaraji receives travel grant
Queenette Okwaraji (LDD Masters student) received a travel grant to attend the Technological Methodologies in Language Documentation and Anthropology workshop at the American Anthropological Association Conference in Washington D.C., Nov 29-Dec 3, 2017.
Aaron White NLP talk
White, A. S., P. Rastogi, K. Duh, & B. Van Durme. (2017). Inference is Everything: Recasting Semantic Resources into a Unified Evaluation Framework. Talk presented by Kevin Duh at the 8th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. Taipei, Taiwan, November 27-December 1, 2017.
Aaron White in Berlin
White, A. S. (2017). Computational approaches to clause selection. Invited talk given at Selectionfest 2017. Humboldt University of Berlin and ZAS Berlin. Berlin, Germany. November 10-11, 2017.
Aaron White at 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development
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.
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.
Joyce McDonough -Mapping the Unseen: Language on landscape
Joyce McDonough, Linguistics
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.
Joint PhD program applications open
Applications for a fully-funded joint PhD program in Linguistics focusing on cross-disciplinary training and collaboration are open. See our PhD program page for details
Maya Abtahian on WXXI's Connections with Evan Dawson
Maya was on Connections with Evan Dawson today talking about the Rochester accent and language change in general. The full show, as well as a clip, are available on Weekend Connections.
Aaron White to teach two courses at ESSLLI 2017 in Toulouse
Aaron will be teaching two courses at the European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information at the University of Tolouse this week. The first is an introductory course on Unsupervised methods for linguistic data, and the second is an advanced course on Computational lexical semantics, which he is coteaching with Kyle Rawlins (Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University).
Joyce McDonough - Visiting Professorships in Beijing and Nanjing China
Joyce McDonough will be giving a lectures at Nanjing Technical University in Nanjing and Minzu University in Beijing, May-June 2017.
Scott Grimm: Invited talk at Northwestern
Scott Grimm presents the Linguistics Colloquium at Northwestern University on "Plurality and Reference".
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."
University of Rochester Professor Emeritus and noted Lithuanian linguist Dr. Antanas Klimas passes away at age 92
Professor Emeritus Antanas Klimas passed away on September 18, 2016 at age 92. Dr. Klimas was a member of faculty from 1957 until 1989. Among Dr. Klimas' notable scholarly achievements was the publication of the first English language grammar of Lithuanian.
Conversations on linguistics and politics with Noam Chomsky
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.
Q&A: The man who invented Dothraki
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.
Joyce McDonough and Doug Whalen publish “Taking the Laboratory into the Field,” in the inaugural volume of the Annual Review of Linguistics
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 Linguistics visit the publication's website.
Scott Grimm joins Faculty in Linguistics
We are very pleased to announce that Scott Grimm will be joining the faculty in the Department of Linguistics in January, 2014.
Laurel Carney (BME) w/ Joyce McDonough awarded NIH-NIDCD "Auditory Processing of Complex Sounds"
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.
Tenure-Track Faculty Positions in Interdisciplinary Research in Data Science
The university has multiple openings for tenure-track faculty in data science and related areas with focuses in
The loss of a Colleague, Rochester Graduate and Dear Friend: Ivan Andrew Sag (1949-2013)
LINGUIST List24.4027
Solviega Armsokaite joins Linguistics Faculty
Solviega 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.
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 University of Rochester and Syracuse University with degrees in Linguistics.
Class of 2013
We extend our congratulations to all of our students who are graduating this year. Their names are listed below.
How Many Tasmanian Languages Were There?
The 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.
Rochester Review: Greg Carlson investigates how language influences consumer choices
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.