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.
Jenna Conklin, one of our visiting assistant professors, recently accepted a post-doc position at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT). She will be working with Martin Krämer to use artificial grammar learning to better map the typology of vowel and consonant harmony. You can learn more about Martin's work on the university's website. Congratulations, Jenna!!
This month, Professor Neil Myler presented at the CRISSP (Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology) seminar on Theme Vowels, Categories, and Categorization. His talk was titled "Romance Conjugation Class Features could be Syntactic (and on certain assumptions must be)" If you couldn't make it, he also did a debrief that you can watch […]
Boston University Linguistics is accepting applications for the MA program until March 15! Learn about the program here: https://www.bu.edu/linguistics/academic-programs/graduate-programs/ma-in-linguistics/ Apply here: https://www.bu.edu/cas/admissions/ma-ms/
Professor Elizabeth Coppock, along with several of her colleagues, has published a new paper! Title: Beware of referential garden paths! The dangerous allure of semantic parses that succeed locally but globally fail URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9q353 Abstract: A central endeavor in psycholinguistic research has been to determine the processing profile of syntactically ambiguous strings. Previous work investigating […]
Prof. Coppock was among the keynote speakers at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024. Her talk was entitled “Metrology and Mereology”. Download the slides from the talk here. Here is the abstract: This talk is about metrology and mereology. Of these, the latter is more familiar to formal semanticist, and, in conjunction with event semantics, has been of use in […]
BU Linguistics is proud to announce that several members of our department are presenting at the 2025 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting in January! Talks: Robert Bayley, Xinye Zhang, Daniel Erker, Rafael Orozco and Gregory Guy: Subject pronoun expression and heritage languages: The effects of language and dialect contact. ADS Morphosyntax session, January […]
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 […]