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News and Events

The Linguistics program is committed to supporting and celebrating the academic growth and accomplishments of our students and faculty.

All program news   all Program Events

Event Series

A variety of event series offered annually focus on specific topics and areas of specialization within the program, highlighting speakers who are experts in their field and providing opportunities for students in the Ph.D. and M.A. programs to enhance their academic and professional skills.

The CUNY Linguistics Colloquium is a series of lectures on any topic of linguistic inquiry given by specialists in their fields. The talks appeal to a broad audience of linguistics students and faculty. Speakers typically feature an introduction in which their specific subject matter is situated in the context of linguistic research. They outline the background of the specific proposal(s) thereby allowing non-specialists to maximally benefit.

Talks are held on select Thursday afternoons from 4:15 p.m.-6:00 p.m. and include a question-and-answer session.

See upcoming Linguistics Colloquia

Download the Spring 2022 schedule (PDF)

The Professional Development Series focuses on a variety of skills needed to have a successful career in Linguistics. Guest speakers – faculty, students, or non-academics – will be invited to provide expertise on both practical and theoretical matters.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Written Materials (creating a CV; writing research statements, cover letters, conference abstracts; paper writing skills)
  • Linguistics Research Methods (introductions to empirical methods that can be used in linguistics and psycholinguistics studies; meant for students already interested in a certain methodology, but all students are encouraged to attend to learn about these methodologies and potential applications in their future careers)
  • Technical Skills (discussions of statistical methods and programs; database and other analyses software),
  • General Career Topics (preparing for the academic job market; making the most of conferences and conference presentations; research ethics and the IRB; issues of diversity and inclusivity in careers; finding good mentors and advisors)

Students are invited to suggest specific topics and speakers for future sessions.

Professional Development sessions are held on select Fridays from 2-4 p.m. and always include time for questions and discussion. Students are encouraged to bring their own materials to relevant lectures for direct feedback.

Contact Dr. Suzanne van der Feest for more information.

View upcoming Professional Development sessions

Sociolinguistics Lunches are a series of talks on sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics given by students, faculty, and visiting scholars usually from local institutions.

Three talks are held each semester, on select Fridays from 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. The format includes ample time for discussion and is an excellent venue for presenting on-going research or research in preparation for publication. All are welcome.

Students and faculty of the Linguistics Program are welcome to present their work at the Sociolinguistics Lunch. For more information or to suggest a speaker contact Cecelia Cutler, Michael Newman or Miki Makihara.

View upcoming Sociolinguistics Lunches

Or download the Spring 2022 schedule (PDF)

The Connecting Innovative Research in CUNY Linguistics (CIRCL) series is designed for students and faculty to share research ideas and get useful feedback in a supportive and stimulating environment.

CIRCL meets on Tuesdays from 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m. View upcoming CIRCL events.

Please note these events are intended for current students and faculty of the Linguistics Program only.

The CUNY Computational Linguistics Lecture Series hosts talks by external experts in computational linguistics, including speech and natural language processing.

Talks are held on select Friday afternoons at 2:30 p.m. and are approximately one hour, including a question-and-answer session.

Linguistics Announcements

More Like This
Jun 22, 2022

Prof. 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
Jun 22, 2022

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
Jun 19, 2022
Linguistics Graduates 2020-2022

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 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
More News Like This

Linguistics Books

language in development a crosslinguistic perspective book cover

Language in Development: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

The MIT Press, 2021

by Gita Martohardjono Associate Professor, Linguistics, Director, Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society Virginia Valian Distinguished Professor, Psychology, Distinguished Professor, Linguistics, Distinguished Professor, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences

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

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Finite-State Text Processing

Finite-State Text Processing

Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2021

by Kyle Gorman Assistant Professor, Linguistics

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

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Anti-contiguity A Theory of Wh- Prosody Jason Kandybowicz book cover

Anti-contiguity A Theory of Wh- Prosody

Oxford University Press, 2020

by Jason Kandybowicz Associate Professor of Linguistics , Linguistics

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

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