Recent News
Joyce McDonough jointly appointed as Richard L. Turner Professor
January 31, 2023

Joyce McDonough, a professor of linguistics, has been jointly appointed as the Richard L. Turner Professor.
Continue ReadingProfessor Nadine Grimm receives 2023 Bloomfield Award from LSA
October 11, 2022

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.”
Continue Reading"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.
Continue ReadingA new publication by Nadine Grimm, assistant professor of linguistics, will soon be available
December 16, 2020
"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.
Continue ReadingCongratulations 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.
Continue ReadingThese mentors make a difference for first-generation, minority students
December 16, 2020
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.
Continue ReadingEnriched Meanings: Natural Language Semantics with Category Theory
September 21, 2020
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
September 8, 2020
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.
Continue ReadingPietraszko—The coming apart of case and focus in Bantu
May 26, 2020
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.
Continue ReadingAsudeh on Grammar and Meaning
January 17, 2020
Linguistics professor and CLS director Ash Asudeh has an article called Grammar and Meaning in the newly published Oxford Handbook of English Grammar.
Continue ReadingPietraszko 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.
Continue ReadingGrimm 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.
Continue ReadingScott Grimm and Peter Guekguezian: Plurality and Determinancy in Western Armenian
December 11, 2019
NaP2019 – Number and plurality: cross-linguistic variation in the nominal domain (University of Goettingen)
Continue ReadingWhite Receives DARPA Grant
November 1, 2019
Aaron Steven White receives DARPA grant for Decompositional Schema Induction and Prediction.
Continue ReadingTalk at MIT
October 26, 2019
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
Continue ReadingInvited Talk at Haskins Laboratories
October 24, 2019
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
Continue ReadingGrimm/McNally Presentation at OASIS
October 16, 2019
Scott Grimm (University of Rochester) and Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra): -Ing nominalizations: Implications for natural language
Continue ReadingPresentations at NWAV48 Conference in Eugene, OR
October 10, 2019
All abstracts for NWAV48 presentations can be found here: https://nwav48.uoregon.edu/program/
Continue ReadingPresentation at Institute of Linguistics
October 4, 2019
Ash Asudeh. Richard Redux. Presented at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota.
Continue ReadingGrimm to Give Talk at SinFonIJA 12 Conference
September 4, 2019
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."
Continue ReadingDunlap Receives ELDP Grant
September 4, 2019
Alexandrine Dunlap receives an ELDP grant to document the endangered Bantu language Gweno of Tanzania.
Continue ReadingNadine Grimm Receives Panini Award
September 4, 2019
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.
Continue ReadingMentors make a difference for first-generation, minority students
August 8, 2019
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.
Continue ReadingWelcome 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.
Continue ReadingInternational 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.
Continue ReadingScott 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”.
Continue ReadingAaron 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.
Continue ReadingScott 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."
Continue ReadingKapner enriches Rochester community through linguistics
September 30, 2018
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.”
Continue ReadingScott 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.
Continue ReadingAsh 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.
Continue Reading5 linguistics students named Fulbright semifinalists
March 8, 2018
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.
Continue ReadingScott Grimm at LOT Winter School
January 8, 2018
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"
Continue ReadingJoyce McDonough at ISMo in Lille France
December 14, 2017
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)
Continue ReadingQueenette Okwaraji receives travel grant
November 29, 2017
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.
Continue ReadingAaron White NLP talk
November 27, 2017
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.
Continue ReadingAaron White in Berlin
November 11, 2017
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.
Continue ReadingAaron White at 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development
November 3, 2017
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.
Continue ReadingAaron 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.
Continue ReadingJoyce McDonough -Mapping the Unseen: Language on landscape
October 17, 2017
Joyce McDonough, Linguistics
Continue ReadingPeter 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.
Continue ReadingJoint PhD program applications open
October 2, 2017
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
Continue ReadingMaya Abtahian on WXXI's Connections with Evan Dawson
September 28, 2017
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.
Continue ReadingAaron White to teach two courses at ESSLLI 2017 in Toulouse
July 24, 2017
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).
Continue ReadingJoyce McDonough - Visiting Professorships in Beijing and Nanjing China
May 29, 2017
Joyce McDonough will be giving a lectures at Nanjing Technical University in Nanjing and Minzu University in Beijing, May-June 2017.
Continue ReadingJoyce McDonough- Labex EFL Chaire Internationale 2017, Université Paris Diderot
April 24, 2017
Labex EFL Chaire Internationale 2017, Université Paris Diderot
Continue ReadingScott Grimm: Invited talk at Northwestern
March 31, 2017
Scott Grimm presents the Linguistics Colloquium at Northwestern University on "Plurality and Reference".
Continue ReadingGreg 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."
Continue ReadingUniversity of Rochester Professor Emeritus and noted Lithuanian linguist Dr. Antanas Klimas passes away at age 92
September 28, 2016
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.
Continue ReadingConversations 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.
Continue ReadingQ&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.
Continue ReadingJoyce 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 Linguistics visit the publication's website.
Continue ReadingThe loss of a Colleague, Beloved Professor and Dear Friend: Scott Paauw (1956-2014)
June 9, 2014
Continue ReadingScott Grimm joins Faculty in Linguistics
January 9, 2014
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"
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.
Continue ReadingTenure-Track Faculty Positions in Interdisciplinary Research in Data Science
November 11, 2013
The university has multiple openings for tenure-track faculty in data science and related areas with focuses in
Continue ReadingThe loss of a Colleague, Rochester Graduate and Dear Friend: Ivan Andrew Sag (1949-2013)
October 14, 2013
LINGUIST List24.4027
Continue ReadingSolviega Armsokaite joins Linguistics Faculty
July 29, 2013
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
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.
Continue ReadingClass of 2013
May 19, 2013
We extend our congratulations to all of our students who are graduating this year. Their names are listed below.
Continue Reading2012 Graduating Students
May 20, 2012
Congratulations to the class of 2012
Continue ReadingHow Many Tasmanian Languages Were There?
February 3, 2012
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
March 1, 2011
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.
Continue Reading