Cornell University

Graduate SchoolGraduate School

Graduate SchoolFields of Study

Linguistics

Field Description

The interests of the faculty cover a wide range of areas in theoretical and experimental linguistics. The field's graduate program includes all facets of linguistics, as well as an exceptionally broad spectrum of courses ranging from computational linguistics and field methods to historical linguistics. All graduate students in the field are enrolled in the Ph.D. program.

Research Facilities: The department offers state-of-the-art facilities for research in phonetics, including an isolated sound booth for audio recording and perception studies, along with equipment for articulatory movement tracking, ultrasound imaging, electroglottography, and speech aerodynamics. The department also hosts a Computational Linguistics Lab which focuses on statistical parsing of large data samples, including grammar development, parameter estimation, and acquisition of lexical information from corpora. The Linguistic Meaning (LiMe) Lab focuses on all facets of linguistic meaning, from its most deterministic aspects to the fleeting meanings that arise during conversation, using insights from multiple fields such as formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. The Language Documentation Lab provides resources and space for work involving language documentation, description, and analysis, with an emphasis on understudied languages and community collaboration.  The Interface Research Lab focuses on understanding the interfaces between phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 

Contact Information

Website: http://linguistics.cornell.edu
Email: lingfield@cornell.edu
Phone: 607 255-1105

203 Morrill Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853

Data and Statistics

Field Manual

Subject and Degrees

Linguistics

Concentrations by Subject

Linguistics

  • computational linguistics (minor)
  • East Asian linguistics (minor)
  • English linguistics (minor)
  • general linguistics
  • Germanic linguistics (minor)
  • Indo-European linguistics (minor)
  • phonetics (minor)
  • phonological theory (minor)
  • second language acquisition (minor)
  • semantics (minor)
  • Slavic linguistics (minor)
  • Southeast Asian Linguistics (minor)
  • syntactic theory (minor)

Faculty

Dorit Abusch

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; semantics
  • Research Interests: semantics of natural language and the syntax-semantics interface

Helena Aparicio Terrasa

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics
  • Research Interests: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Semantics/Pragmatics

John S Bowers

  • Campus: Ithaca - (Graduate School Professor)
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: English linguistics; general linguistics; semantics; syntactic theory
  • Research Interests: syntactic theory

E Wayles Browne

  • Campus: Ithaca - (Graduate School Professor)
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; Slavic linguistics
  • Research Interests: Slavic linguistics

Abigail C Cohn

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; phonetics; phonological theory; Southeast Asian Linguistics
  • Research Interests: phonology; phonetics-phonology interface; Indonesian linguistics

Miloje Despic

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; Slavic linguistics; syntactic theory
  • Research Interests: Syntax, Morphology, Interfaces, Sociolinguistics, Language and Gender.

Molly E Diesing

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; Germanic linguistics; semantics; syntactic theory
  • Research Interests: syntactic theory; semantics; Germanic linguistics

Wayne Eugene Harbert

  • Campus: Ithaca - (Graduate School Professor)
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: English linguistics; general linguistics; Germanic linguistics; syntactic theory
  • Research Interests: German and Celtic linguistics; syntactic theory

Jennifer Kuo

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; phonological theory; second language acquisition
  • Research Interests: Professor Kuo investigates the structure of paradigms, and how different learning biases affect the learning of paradigms. She addresses this question by looking at paradigm reanalysis over time, and how markedness effects and frequency-matching interact to influence the direction of reanalysis. In more recent work, she is supplementing these findings with experimental evidence from Artificial Grammar Learning experiments. Professor Kuo's dissertation, titled "Phonological markedness effects in paradigm reanalysis", looks at the interaction of frequency-matching with markedness-avoidance in Malagasy, Samoan, and Ma¯ori.

Sarah E. Murray

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; semantics
  • Research Interests: semantics and pragmatics of natural language; cognitive science; philosophy of language; Cheyenne

Alan Jeffrey Nussbaum

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; Indo-European linguistics
  • Research Interests: Indo-European linguistics; Greek and Latin language and linguistics; Homer; Old Latin

Martha E. Pollack

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: computational linguistics; general linguistics
  • Research Interests: computational linguistics

Mats Rooth

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: computational linguistics; general linguistics; semantics
  • Research Interests: computational linguistics; semantics

Samuel Tilsen

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; phonetics; phonological theory
  • Research Interests: Cognitive neuro science; dynamical systems

Marten van Schijndel

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: computational linguistics; general linguistics

Michael L Weiss

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; Indo-European linguistics
  • Research Interests: Indo-European linguistics; historical linguistics

John Bradford Whitman

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: East Asian linguistics; general linguistics; syntactic theory
  • Research Interests: syntactic theory; East Asian linguistics

John Ulrich Wolff

  • Campus: Ithaca - (Graduate School Professor)
  • Concentrations: Linguistics: general linguistics; Southeast Asian Linguistics