ASL program offers performance series, welcomes new faculty
Lisa Sunde also helps to advise the American Sign Language club and manages the weekly ASL conversation hour in the Language Resource Center.
Read moreOur department’s focus spans most of the major theoretical subfields of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, historical linguistics and language documentation. Our central research goal is the enhancement of our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms for acquiring and storing the knowledge of language.
Linguistics, the systematic study of human language, lies at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences. Much of its appeal derives from the special combination of intuition and rigor that the analysis of language demands. Major subfields include: phonetics and phonology, the study of speech sounds; syntax, the study of how words are combined; semantics, the study of meaning; historical linguistics, the study of language change in time; and computational linguistics, the modeling of natural language in all its aspects from a computational perspective.
Studying linguistics is not a matter of studying many languages. Linguistics is a theoretical discipline with ties to such areas as cognitive psychology, philosophy, logic, computer science and anthropology. Nonetheless, knowing particular languages (e.g., Spanish or Japanese) in some depth can enhance understanding of the general properties of human language. Not surprisingly, many students of linguistics owe their initial interest to a period of exposure to a foreign language, and those who come to linguistics by some other route find their knowledge about languages enriched and are often stimulated to embark on further foreign language study.
In addition to our traditional strength in theoretical linguistics, the department has built strength in experimental and computational methodologies with ongoing projects including studies of production of speech using articulometry and real-time MRI techniques, studies of syntactic processing using functional MRI and statistical modeling of brain activity and web harvesting of spoken language data. Another important research direction is linguistic data collection in the field, with a special focus on languages at the verge of extinction.
There are several labs and research groups that facilitate the research activities of both students and faculty. Experimental studies that scrutinize theoretical questions of current relevance underlie much student and faculty research. Fieldwork is another important component of our research profile, and several faculty work on endangered languages.
Lisa Sunde also helps to advise the American Sign Language club and manages the weekly ASL conversation hour in the Language Resource Center.
Read more“We felt this is an important resource that should be available to our humanists at all levels, whether they have the resources to pay for membership or not,” said Peter John Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences.
Read moreCongratulations to Nielson Hul, Linguistics Ph.D. candidate, who has been selected to head the Khmer Language Program at the University of Washington at Seattle.
Read moreTo celebrate Cornell’s commitment to fostering global literacy and cross-cultural understanding, the Language Resource Center in the College of Arts and Sciences will host World Languages Day on Oct. 26.
Read moreCongratulations to graduate student Charlotte Logan on winning the Elouise Cobell Dissertation Fellowship in 2024.
Read moreCornell, the only institution offering regular multilevel instruction in all six of the major Southeast Asian languages – Burmese, Indonesian, Khmer, Filipino (Tagalog), Thai and Vietnamese – will host a conference on the teaching of these languages on Sept. 19-21.
Read more"Cornell alumni are generous with their time and efforts to assist students, to answer questions from students, or connect them to people and places."
Read morePeter John Loewen says he's excited to support faculty in their research, meet students and showcase the value of a liberal arts education.
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