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"A theme of the Harrison College Scholar Program is that our students are independent but not isolated."
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.
"A theme of the Harrison College Scholar Program is that our students are independent but not isolated."
Read MoreCornell University's undergraduate linguistics association, The UnderLings, presents its seventeenth annual undergraduate research colloquium. By facilitating communication and discussion between researchers, the conference aims to promote undergraduate research at all levels throughout the linguist...
Read MoreInterest in ASL is growing, prompting Cornell to increase opportunities for students to explore the language.
Read MoreOn Thursday, March 16, join the Cornell community to make a difference for students on Cornell Giving Day.
Read MoreTwo recently-hired faculty in the Department of Linguistics are expanding the use of computer modeling and experimental techniques as they forge new paths of research in the discipline.
Read MoreSireemas Maspong has accepted a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She will be working with Prof. James Kirby, Professor of Spoken Language Processing. She will be joining the department in April...
Read MoreFrancesco Burroni Accepts Postdoctoral Fellow Position at the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS), LMU Munich
Read MoreThe two are among five winners of the inaugural Robert S. Harrison ’76 Recent Alumni Volunteer Awards.
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