We are internationally recognized as a major center for work in theoretical, experimental and field linguistics. Our top-ranked doctoral program focuses on educating a small number of PhD students as high quality researchers and teachers. The atmosphere here is cooperative and collegial, with faculty and students collaborating on projects in a range of areas including phonology, syntax, semantics, phonetics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, prosody, field linguistics, typology, historical linguistics, and morphology. We are especially known for innovative work at the interfaces between areas.
 

New Programs:

• Two new joint majors:
  • Linguistics and Spanish
  • Linguistics and Portuguese

John McCarthy Becomes Dean of Graduate School

John J. McCarthy has been appointed Vice-Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School. Dean McCarthy is a Distinguished University Professor and was formerly Special Assistant to the Provost and Head of the Department of Linguistics. Read more about the Dean here. Congratulations, John!

Elisabeth Selkirk Awarded NSF Grant

Professor Emerita Elisabeth Selkirk has been awarded a nearly $500,000 grant by the National Science Foundation to study the "Effects of Syntactic Constuency on Phonology and Phonetics of Tone" (BCS-1147083). The award includes subawards for Central Connecticut State University and the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Selkirk held the first project meeting at the Linguistics department this month with her collaborators, Seunghun Lee of CCSU, Gorka Elordieta of UBC, and Emily Elfner, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University and recent UMass alumna. Assistant Professors Kristine Yu and Seth Cable will also lend their expertise to the project. The project is expected to conclude in December 2015.