News and Events
The Linguistics program is committed to supporting and celebrating the academic growth and accomplishments of our students and faculty.
Linguistics Announcements
More Like ThisProf. Cece Cutler co-organized a seminar at the Inter University Centre in Dubrovnik
Prof. Cece Cutler co-organized a seminar on multilingual, multilectal, and multiscriptal writing at the Inter University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 20-24, 2022. She gave a talk entitled "Spelling norms and orality: writing the New York City Accent on YouTube".
- Announcement
Prof. Cutler co-organized a panel on language activism
Prof. Cutler co-organized a panel on language activism at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 24 in Ghent, Belgium, July 13-16, 2022 . She will give a talk entitled "Labelling ethnolects: challenges and potentials in light of the “principle of error correction”.
- Announcement
Prof. Kyle Gorman: Seminar and Workshop
Prof. Kyle Gorman will be giving a NL seminar at the Information Sciences Institute at University of Southern California on June 23, 2022, titled, “Weighted Finite-State Transducers: The Later Years”.
Prof. Gorman will also be teaching a linguistics workshop at NASSLLI 2022, June 18-24 at the University of Southern California, hosted by USC: https://ml-la.github.io/nasslli2022/index.html.
- Announcement

Congratulations to our 2021-2022 graduates!
PhD: Boram Kim, Susana Huidobro, Chaya Nove, SeJin Oh, and Jennifer Seale
MA: Kelsey Bourque, Matthew Kadish, Jonathan I. Manczur, Lara Novic, William Oliver, Yuying Ren, Yulia Spektor, Natalia Tyulina, and Brynne Wilkinson
- Congratulations/Kudos
Recent Linguistics News
May 26, 2022
‘22 Grads Blaze Ahead Into New Jobs and Opportunities
From nanoscience to queer criminology, our graduates are launching careers and bright futures with their new skills
- GC Stories
- Student News
- Alumni News
May 2, 2022
Exploring the Layers of Language
For linguist Sejin Oh, the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral research in Paris represents “a dream-come-true moment.”
- Alumni News
- GC Stories
Dec 23, 2021
CONGRATULATIONS TO PH.D. STUDENT CAROLINA FRAGA
Graduate Center Linguistics Ph.D. student Carolina Fraga was awarded an Early Research Initiative Catalyst Grant. This award is from the GC Provost's Office to provide...
- Student News
Dec 4, 2021
CONGRATULATIONS TO PH.D. STUDENT DANIELA CASTILLO
Linguistics Ph.D. student Daniela Castillo gave a presentation titled “The clause-internal phase boundary in Spanish” at Going Romance 2021, the European conference series that focuses...
- Student News
Linguistics Books

Language in Development: A Crosslinguistic Perspective
The MIT Press, 2021
Gita Martohardjono and Suzanne Flynn (editors)
Explorations of language development in different types of learner populations and across various languages.
This volume examines language development in different types of learner populations and across various languages. The contributors analyze experimental studies of child and adult language acquisition, heritage language development, bilingualism, and language disorders. They consider theoretical and methodological issues; language development in children, discussing topics that range from gestures to errors in person and number agreement; and development and attrition of (morpho)syntactic constructions in second language learners, bilinguals, and Alzheimer's patients.
The approach is "crosslinguistic" in three senses of the word: The contributors offer analyses of acquisition phenomena in different languages; they consider "crosslinguistic influence," or the potential effects of multiple languages on one another in the mind of the same speaker; and (in a novel use of the term, proposed by the editors) the chapters bring together theoretical and methodological approaches pertinent to the linguistics of language development in children, adults, and heritage speakers.
Book contributors include several Graduate Center scholars: Distinguished Professor Virginia Valian (GC/Hunter, Psychology); Professor Emerita Elaine Klein (GC/Queens, Linguistics); and Graduate Center alumni Christen Madsen (Ph.D. '18, Linguistics) Ian Phillips (Ph.D. '18, Linguistics); and Michael Stern (M.A. '20, Linguistics).
Published September 2021

Finite-State Text Processing
Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2021
Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat
Weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) are commonly used by engineers and computational linguists for processing and generating speech and text. This book first provides a detailed introduction to this formalism. It then introduces Pynini, a Python library for compiling finite-state grammars and for combining, optimizing, applying, and searching finite-state transducers. This book illustrates this library's conventions and use with a series of case studies. These include the compilation and application of context-dependent rewrite rules, the construction of morphological analyzers and generators, and text generation and processing applications.
Published May 2021

Anti-contiguity A Theory of Wh- Prosody
Oxford University Press, 2020
A recent wave of research has explored the link between wh- syntax and prosody, breaking with the traditional generative conception of a unidirectional syntax-phonology relationship. In this book, Jason Kandybowicz develops Anti-contiguity Theory as a compelling alternative to Richards' Contiguity Theory to explain the interaction between the distribution of interrogative expressions and the prosodic system of a language. Through original and highly detailed fieldwork on several under-studied West African languages (Krachi, Bono, Wasa, Asante Twi, and Nupe), Kandybowicz presents empirically and theoretically rich analyses bearing directly on a number of important theories of the syntax-prosody interface. His observations and analyses stem from original fieldwork on all five languages and represent some of the first prosodic descriptions of the languages. The book also considers data from thirteen additional typologically diverse languages to demonstrate the theory's reach and extendibility.
Against the backdrop of data from eighteen languages, Anti-contiguity offers a new lens on the empirical and theoretical study of wh- prosody.
Published November 2020