Congratulations to undergraduate Computer Science and Linguistics double major Alessio Tosolini, who has received a 2023-24 Chester William Fritz Humanities Scholarship. This award supports highly deserving students in the Humanities departments of the College of Arts and Sciences.
In her letter of support for the nomination, Prof. Myriam Lapierre wrote of UG RA Tosolini: “I am genuinely impressed by Mr. Tosolini’s potential for outstanding research. Despite having only completed the core… Read more
Gail Stygall (English; Adjunct, Linguistics) has completed the paperwork for a bequest to create an endowed graduate fellowship, the Gail Stygall Endowed Graduate Fellowship, which will provide financial support for graduate students in the Department of Linguistics. The fellowship will preferentially be awarded to students studying sociolinguistics or phonetics, but other fields may be considered.
Andrew Hedding, who has been an Acting Assistant Professor in Linguistics during the 2022-23 academic year, has recently been hired as an Assistant Professor. Hedding is a theoretical syntactician with a particular interest in information structure. For some years he has been researching the linguistic structures of San Martín Peras Mixtec, working directly with speakers in Mexico as well as with members of the diaspora community in California.
Associate Dean for the Humanities Brian Reed… Read more
Barbara Citko has been awarded the Linguistics Department’s Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professorship for 2023-2025. The endowed professorship was established in Linguistics 2004 by a $500,000 gift from Howard and Frances Nostrand, intended to promote language and culture as a new discipline, and to underscore the need for cultural competence. Prof. Nostrand chaired the UW Department of Romance Languages and… Read more
Emily M. Bender talks about why language produced by large language models is not the same as language produced by a human, and the dangers of confusing the two. Read more
Assistant Professor Myriam Lapierre joined the Department of Linguistics in Autumn 2021. For her 2021 U.C. Berkeley dissertation, Towards a Theory of Subsegmental and Subfeatural Representations: The Phonology and Typology of Nasality, she collected and analyzed phonetic and phonological data on nasality from two unrelated languages spoken in the Brazilian Amazon, Panãra (Jê family) and Kawaiwete (Tupí-Guaraní family), working directly with speakers of these two languages.
Lapierre… Read more
Members of the Winter 2023 course LING 580EF, Field Methods, were fortunate to be able to work with Tsering Yuthok, a native speaker of Lhasa Tibetan. Yuthok patiently produced words and sentences for the class, who tackled the difficult structures of Lhasa Tibetan, which include tone, complex verbal morphology, and an egophoricity/evidentiality system. One class assignment centered around transcribing and glossing a short text produced by Yuthok about thanka paintings.
One of the class… Read more
At the beginning of 2022, Professor Myriam Lapierre launched the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (LURAP), and suggested the founding of an undergraduate version of the Linguistics Society of University of Washington (LSUW). Thus was formed the Undergraduate Linguistics Society at the University of Washington (ULS@UW). One of the founding members of ULS@UW, Deslatte “Latte”… Read more