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News

Commencement 2013

Congratulations to all our 2013 graduates !!!!

The convocation (the ceremony where diplomas will be awarded for students with majors in the Department of Romance Studies) will take place Saturday, May 18th, at 9:00 am in the Fitness & Recreation Center, 915 Commonwealth Ave.. We are looking forward to congratulating all our majors in Linguistics, French & Linguistics, Italian & Linguistics, Spanish & Linguistics, Japanese & Linguistics, and Linguistics & Philosophy (and their families). Please come!

If for any reason you have not received the official information about the ceremony from Jennifer Cavanaugh, please let us know right away.

For those of you who may have double majors, including one that is outside of the Department of Romance Studies (or outside of CAS), you are very welcome to attend the ceremonies for both departments. For details of other departments' convocations, see this page.

Courses for Fall 2013

See the Linguistics course offerings for Fall 2013 and Spring 2014. A few notes:

!! EXTRA !! EXTRA !!
Late-breaking addition to the course schedule for fall 2013:
CAS LX 235 LANGUAGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD:
Technology, Society, and the Law.
TR 11-12:30. Taught by Luc Baronian.

    Exploration of the role of human language in a range of activities and endeavors, focusing on issues of technology, governmental policy, education, gender roles, legal language, language crimes, and the use of language in both media and politics to shape perceptions.

Satisfies CAS Divisional Studies course requirements for the Humanities.

NOW AVAILABLE for pre-registration on the Link.
See full listing of Linguistics courses for fall: http://ling.bu.edu/courses/schedules/fall2013.

Recent Events

* NEW *
For members of the BU community who missed either of these presentations -- or who would like to see them again: You can watch the videos.  The slides are also available for viewing, so you can follow along.  Click here for access


Ricardo Otheguy
CUNY Graduate Center, Linguistics / Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literature & Language

  • "On so-called Spanglish"
    Thursday, April 18, 2013, 7:30-9 PM, KCB 101
    Sponsored by the BU Linguistics Association

 Lisa Matthewson
 University of British Columbia, Department of Linguistics

Welcome to Sasha Nikolaev !

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Alexander Nikolaev will be joining us as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies as of September 2013 (although you might have a chance to meet him and welcome him to BU before that, at one of our spring events).

Sasha Nikolaev is both a classicist and a linguist, and he is most interested in where language and literature meet. As a historian of literature, he works on archaic Greek poetry (Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, etc.). As a linguist, he is primarily interested in Greek historical linguistics and etymology, but he has also done work on the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and on the history of other Indo-European languages and language families, including Hittite, Sanskrit, Old Persian and Avestan, Old Irish, Tocharian and Balto-Slavic. We hope and expect that he will be teaching courses of interest to students of linguistics, and we will keep you informed :-)

New Honors Program in Linguistics

Linguistics majors who qualify are invited to apply for admission into the new Honors program. There are also honors programs available for the various Linguistics joint majors (described here). Those of you who are not yet juniors might consider applying in the future.

The Linguistics Honors program requires 14 courses (rather than 12, as for the standard major), to include 3 at an advanced level; these must be completed with a GPA of at least 3.7. Students who complete the program successfully will graduate "with Honors in Linguistics."

Honors program application forms: Linguistics, Linguistics & Philosophy, French & Linguistics, Italian & Linguistics, Japanese & Linguistics, Spanish & Linguistics. [Applications for admission as of Fall 2013 will be accepted from 4/25/2013 to 9/10/2013 (for students who will be graduating between January 2015 and September 2015).]

A variety of co-curricular activities will be organized for program participants. Complete details are available from this page: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/honors/honors-for-ling.html. Students who may be interested in this program are also strongly encouraged to discuss this with their faculty advisor and/or Prof. Neidle.

Joint Majors in Linguistics & French/Italian/Japanese/Spanish

In addition to our joint major in Linguistics & Philosophy (Hegis code: 1514), we are now pleased to be able to offer joint majors that combine the study of linguistics with that of language, literature, and culture. Here's some informationabout these majors (and the corresponding honors programs):

French & Linguistics (Hegis code: 1147)
Italian & Linguistics (Hegis code: 1148)
Japanese & Linguistics (Hegis code: 1149)
Spanish & Linguistics (Hegis code: 1150)

To declare a new major, this form needs to be submitted to the College of Arts and Sciences: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/ling-major_minor_declare.pdf, and the Hegis code should be included. (For Linguistics, that is 1505.)

For further information, contact Prof. Neidle.

Requirements for the Linguistics Major - modified as of September 2011

The current requirements for the linguistics major apply to students who declared their major no earlier than Fall of 2011. Students who declared their major prior to September of 2011 will be expected to fulfill the requirements in effect at that time, although they may elect to fulfill the newer requirements instead by so notifying the CAS Records Office (and their advisor). Please address any questions about this to your advisor.

Presentation by Mara Breen

Some pictures have been posted from Mara Breen's presentation on "Implicit prosody in reading: Listening to the little voice in our heads."

    Abstract: For over one hundred years, researchers have wondered about the nature of the inner voice during silent reading. One of the main questions that has concerned researchers is whether the inner voice serves a purpose
    during reading. That is, is the producing, or hearing, of words and phrases during reading simply epiphenomenal—a by-product of the fact that language has been spoken far longer than it has been written, or does it enhance the reader’s processing and understanding of the written word? In the current talk, I will present eye-tracking and event-related potential experiments designed to empirically explore the nature of this inner voice, commonly called implicit prosody. I will argue that implicit prosody plays a functional role during reading, in that it can direct the reader’s syntactic interpretation of sentences.
Sponsored by the CAS Linguistics Program, with support from the CAS Academic Enhancement Fund. For further information, please contact Prof. Neidle. Click here for a printable version of this announcement.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Grillo!

For the Phi Beta Kappa award she received on December 4, 2012, we extend congratulations to linguistics major Elizabeth Grillo (and her parents)!

Welcome our newest faculty member

We extend a warm welcome to our new Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, Danny Erker. He has just completed his PhD in Linguistics at New York University, with a dissertation on New York Spanish.
He introduces himself in a video posted here. Have a look.

He is teaching the following courses this year:

  • CAS LS 505 A1 The Sounds of Spanish (fall 2012)
  • CAS LX 500 A1 The Evolution of Language (fall 2012)
  • CAS LS 505 A1 The Structure of Spanish (spring 2013)

PS: You can discover another side of Danny Erker on our Facebook page :-)

Fall newsletter

Catch up on the latest news - see our newsletter

Prof. Jonathan Barnes becomes Director of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics

Effective July 1, 2012, Prof. Barnes assumed the role of Director of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics, http://www.bu.edu/applied-linguistics.

BULA on the Web

Check out the site for the BU undergraduate Linguistics Association: http://bula.bu.edu.

BULA also has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Boston-University-Linguistics-Association/142505152475244.

Events are open to the BU community, and if you'd like to help in planning future events, new BULA members are always welcome :-)

CAS Linguistics Facebook Page

Have a look: https://www.facebook.com/BULinguistics.

      Become a fan!

We welcome your suggestions about what else you would like to see there... Thanks!

Follow BU Linguistics on Twitter

http://twitter.com/bulinguistics

Alumni Notes/News

See our Alumni Notes page. Please let us know what you're up to. Send your news and photos. We'd love to hear from you :-)

Recent grants from the National Science Foundation

Update: August 2011

Professor Carol Neidle received new funding from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled "Generating Accurate, Understandable Sign Language Animations Based on Analysis of Human Signing," a collaboration with researchers Matt Huenerfauth at CUNY and Dimitris Metaxas at Rutgers University.

Professor Neidle is also continuing her NSF-funded collaboration with Prof. Dimitris Metaxas of Rutgers University: "Linguistically Based ASL Sign Recognition as a Structured Multivariate Learning Problem."

The National Science Foundation has also recently provided support for "Development of Publicly Available, Easily Searchable, Linguistically Analyzed, Video Corpora for Sign Language and Gesture Research," a collaboration involving Profs. Neidle and Sclaroff at BU, Metaxas at Rutgers University, Bahan and Vogler at Gallaudet University, and Athitsos at the University of Texas in Arlington.


the ASLLRP research team on a field trip (July 2011)

September 2010

Professor Jonathan Barnes is involved in collaborative research with Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (MIT) and Nanette Veilleux (Simmons). They just received funding from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled "Collaborative research: Integrating shape, scaling, and alignment in a global approach to F0 events in intonation systems." The research team had previously received NSF funding for study of "Global Measures of Tonal Alignment in a Level-based Theory of Intonational Phonology" and "Prosodic Categories of American English in Form and Function."