Recent News
Professor Sharon Hargus taught a field methods course during Autumn Quarter focused on documentation of the Tigrinya language. Tigrinya is a Semitic language, spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Working with native speaker Seium Habties, originally from Eritrea, Professor Hargus and four graduate students spent many hours each week on the standard language documentation topics of grammar, texts and lexicon. This course offered a very unique opportunity to students Jiahui Huang and Ted Kye of... Read more
The Department of Linguistics is proud to have co-sponsored Professor Joseph C. Hill's lecture "Emerging Trends in the Study of Black ASL: History, Structure, and People" at the University of Washington on March 13, 2019. Dr. Hill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Sign Language and Interpreting Education at the National Technical Institutes for the Deaf, and gave this talk as part of the UW Graduate School Public Lecture... Read more
Five sociolinguists represented our department in October at the 47th New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference at New York University. Attendees included Professor Alicia Wassink, and Ph.D. students Nicole Chartier, Kirby Conrod, Ben Jones, and Rob Squizzero.
Nicole Chartier and Ben Jones presented a poster called "Six Views of New England: Mapping Perceptions of New England Speech." Kirby Conrod gave a talk called "Pronouns and Misgendering... Read more
It's time to register for Winter Quarter courses! Are you interested in learning about why people swear and what rules govern taboo language? Perhaps you're curious about sign languages. Or maybe you're interested in multilingualism and language contact? Consider LING 269 (Swearing and Taboo Language), LING 403 (Linguistics of Signed Languages), or LING 234 (Language and Diversity). None of these courses have prerequisites!
If you've... Read more
Professor Edith Aldridge hosted a workshop called "Modality in Classical Chinese" at the Simpson Center for the Humanities on November 30 and December 1. The workshop was co-organized by Professor Zev Handel of the Department of Asian Languages & Literatures, and included speakers from universities in China, Taiwan, and the United States. For more information and a detailed schedule, please see the workshop website... Read more
The UW Linguistics Department is saddened to report the passing of our dear friend and colleague Dr. Akira Omaki on August 6, 2018, due to complications from lymphoma. Dr. Omaki joined UW Linguistics in 2016 and developed curriculum and research on first language acquisition and language processing and established the Language Development and Processing Lab.
Dr. Omaki received his PhD from the University of Maryland in 2010, and worked as a... Read more
Congratulations to Professors Barbara Citko and Toshiyuki Ogihara, the 2018 recipients of the Linguistics Fund award. The Linguistics Fund award is a grant awarded to faculty researchers in linguistics to directly fund research, awarded to two faculty each year. Professor Ogihara will be using the award to complete work on his upcoming book on temporal semantics, and Professor Citko will be working on a new project on the syntax of agreement in relative clauses with coordinated heads.
This year has been a year of amazing achievements for our linguistics students! Please join us in honoring those who are graduating or receiving awards.
We are awarding 57 BAs this spring and summer--54 in Linguistics and 3 in Romance Linguistics--including 11 double-majors. The Linguistics department is delighted to award Linguistics Departmental Honors to Dakota Giltner, Ian Gwin, Andrew Heidke, Johanna Mannisto, and Elizabeth Solallonch. Anne Soedal is receiving Interdisciplinary Honors.... Read more
The Linguistics Department hosted our annual Undergraduate Research Colloquium this May. Ari Goertzel, Andrew Heidke, Ellen Perleberg, and Gregory Pflaumer, all undergraduate researchers, presented their original research in linguistics. The talks covered a range of topics, from theoretical syntax to second language aquisition. The titles of the talks were:
Collaboration and Communication between Second-Language Learners and Heritage Language Students in Mixed-Language Classes
Ellen... Read more
Linguistics PhD candidate Laura Panfili successfully defended her dissertation entitled "Cross-Linguistic Acoustic Characteristics of Phonation: A Machine Learning Approach" on April 27, 2018. Laura is a recipient of the prestigious UW Graduate School Presidential Fellowship, which awards excellent PhD candidates with a quarter of support.