News

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WELCOME (back) to everyone!

Please send email if we can offer advice or assistance...

Fall office hours for Linguistics faculty are available here. Have a good semester!

Linguistics courses

See the list of Linguistics courses:

Fall 2011 and Spring 2012.

Linguistics Major Requirements: something old and something new

For new Linguistics majors, there is a slightly revised set of requirements for the major, available here: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/new-major-bulletin-copy.pdf.

Students who declared their major by May 2011 have a choice to fulfill the requirements in place at the time they declared the major, or to fulfill the new requirements. The previous requirements are included in the flyer from AY 2010-2011: you can print one out for yourself (double-sided) :

http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/flyer-Feb-2011.pdf

There is no change to the four foreign language courses required, nor to five of the linguistics requirements: CAS LX 250 Introduction to Linguistics, CAS LX 502 Semantics I, CAS LX 510 Phonetics, CAS LX 522 Syntax I, and one course dealing with the linguistics of a specific language). However, two of the remaining three linguistics electives are now to be chosen from a more restricted set of options.

New Honors Program in Linguistics - launches in September 2011 !

Linguistics majors who will be juniors or seniors in the Fall of 2011 -- and who qualify -- are invited to apply, any time between now and September 10, 2011, for admission into the new Honors program in the Fall semester!

The 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."

Those of you who will be freshmen or sophomores next year might consider applying in the future

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.

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

New joint majors, combining the study of linguistics with that of language, literature, and culture, are currently in the final stages of development. Here's a preview of what we expect make available to students during the coming academic year 2011-12 (pending final approval) for:

French & Linguistics
Italian & Linguistics
Japanese & Linguistics and
Spanish & Linguistics

For further information, contact Prof. Neidle.

Position announcement:
Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics

Boston University is seeking a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics beginning September 2012. The details are on the Job openings at BU page on this site.

Two BU Linguistics undergraduates presented their work at Harvard in April

Lara Bryfonski and Henrison Hsieh had abstracts accepted for presentation at the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium ( April 9-10, 2011). Henrison Hsieh presented his paper on "Negative Existentials and Case Acrobatics in Tagalog," and Lara Bryfonski presented her paper on "Linguistic Relativity and Spatial Prepositions."

Advising for Linguistics

Contact information and office hours for Linguistics faculty are available here.

New joint major in Linguistics and Philosophy

We are launching a brand new program. See this page for more information.

For a printable page with details of the requirements, see this page.

NEW: To declare a major in Linguistics and Philosophy, submit this form to the college.
The Code for this new major is 1514.
(The Code to use for the Linguistics major is 1505.)

Great Opportunity to Study Linguistics in Paris

The new Paris Contemporary Studies Program

Only available for fall semesters:

http://www.bu.edu/abroad/programs/paris-contemporary-studies-program/
http://www.bu.edu/paris/paris-contemporary-studies-program/
http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/paris8.html

The program offers a particularly rich set of options for Linguistics courses, with an excellent Linguistics faculty (at both Paris 8 and the Ecole Normale Superieure).

Feel free to contact Carol Neidle directly with any particular questions you might have.

Congratulations to our award winners

On December 1, 2010, four Phi Beta Kappa Awards were presented to Juniors in recognition of their demonstrated level of scholarship and academic achievement. Two of those awards went to Linguistics Majors, and we congratulate Henrison Hsieh (who is also majoring in Computer Science) and Bethany Hutchens on their awards.

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.

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.

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."

Professor Carol Neidle just received NSF funding for her continuing collaboration with Prof. Dimitris Metaxas of Rutgers University: "Linguistically Based ASL Sign Recognition as a Structured Multivariate Learning Problem".

Prof. Neidle is also continuing her research with Profs. Stan Sclaroff (BU Computer Science) and Vassilis Athitsos (BU PhD 2006, now at the University of Texas at Arlington) on "Large Lexicon Gesture Representation, Recognition, and Retrieval," development of techniques for computer-based recognition of ASL signs. One goal of the research is development of a "look-up" capability, whereby a signer can produce a sign in front of a camera, or identify a sign in a video, and have the computer identify which sign it is. One application of this technology would be an interface for a multi-media sign language dictionary.

New website for BULA

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

BULA also has a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2200303909.

Check out all the upcoming events. 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: http://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

Any interest in a Linguistics House ?

There may be a possibility of establishing a "Linguistics House" in one of the brownstones on campus. We would like to see whether there would be interest among the students. Could you please respond to this unbelievably short survey? THANKS! And feel free to pass along this information to others who might be interested...

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 :-)

Study Abroad

Study Abroad programs that include Linguistics options