American Sign Language Has Found a Growing Home on the Hill
The ASL Program at Cornell is featured in this article in Cornell's alumni publication, Cornellians.
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.
The ASL Program at Cornell is featured in this article in Cornell's alumni publication, Cornellians.
Read moreHitomi Minamida, Ph.D. ’23, has accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Read more“Any poem, any language” is the theme of the Language Resource Center’s second annual celebration of National Poetry Month, April 17
Read moreThe grants provide funding for students in unpaid or low-paying summer experiences to offset the cost of taking on those positions.
Read moreMargarita Amalia Suñer, professor of linguistics emerita in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), died in Ojai, California on Feb. 29 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 82.
Read moreLinguistics Professor Sarah Murray and Research Associate Stephen Henhawk are featured in this article by the Cornell Daily Sun.
Read moreYour gift allows the College to fulfill our mission — to prepare our students to do the greatest good in the world.
Read moreThe Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), co-founded by alum Daniel Kaufman Ph.D. 2010, locates speakers of endangered languages spoken in New York City.
Read more