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More Like ThisCongratulations
Prof. Kyle Gorman (et al) received a $150,000 start-up grant from the US – Israel Binational Science Foundation for a project titled “Diacritization for the World's Scripts”
- Announcement
Congratulations
Simon Zuberek (CL M.A. student) will be leading a workshop titled “A Calculator for Writing: Harnessing Generative AI to Develop Instructional Content for Foreign Language Writing” at the VI Consortium Workshop for Language Teaching and Learning (CLTL) at Princeton University, Oct. 6-7, 2023.
- Announcement

Congratulations
Students and faculty presented at the Heritage Languages at the Crossroads (HL@Cross): cultural contexts, individual differences and methodologies conference on May 29th in Istanbul, Turkey:
- Emeritus Prof. Gita Martohardjono, Michael Johns, Daniela Castillo, Pamela Franciotti, Ilaria Porru presented: "Language Use Modulates Processing of Island Constraints in Heritage Speakers and Late Bilinguals"
- LeeAnn Stover, Prof. Irina Sekerina, Emeritus Prof. Gita Martohardjono presented: "Language Experience Impacts L2 English Scope Computation"
- Announcement
Christina Hagedorn
This July, Prof. Christina Hagedorn will be presenting her work, “The Role of High-Performance Low Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the Management of Tongue Cancer,” at the American Head and Neck Society’s 11th International Conference on Head and Neck Surgery in Montreal, Canada.
- Announcement
Recent Linguistics News
Sep 18, 2023
ChatGPT Tips for the CUNY Classroom, Version 2.0
Graduate Center scholars share their latest insights on teaching in an AI-infused world.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
- Student News
- Alumni News
Sep 12, 2023
A Linguistics Ph.D. Student Seeks to Save an Endangered Italian Dialect
Chiara Di Maio, a new Linguistics doctoral student, is trying to better understand and to protect a dialect spoken on an island in the Venetian Lagoon.
- GC Stories
- Student News
Sep 8, 2023
In Memoriam: Emerita Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Janet Dean Fodor
The Graduate Center community mourns the death of an influential psycholinguist and cherished teacher, mentor, and friend.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
- In Memoriam
Aug 8, 2023
CUNY Graduate Center Receives $3 Million Through Google Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program
The program is designed to spur cybersecurity research and increase diversity in the field, and nine CUNY faculty members will receive support in the first year.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
Linguistics Books

Digital Orality
Vernacular Writing in Online Spaces
co-edited by May Ahmar (Linguistics Ph.D. candidate), Wafa Bahri (Ph.D. '19, Linguistics)
This volume showcases innovative research on dialectal, vernacular, and other forms of “oral,” speech-like writing in digital spaces. The shift from a predominantly print culture to a digital culture is shaping people's identities and relationships to one another in important ways. Using examples from distinct international contexts and language varieties (kiAmu, Lebanese, Ettounsi, Shanghai Wu, Welsh English, and varieties of American English) the authors examine how people use unexpected codes, scripts, and spellings to say something about who they are or aspire to be. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the impact of social media on language use, style, and orthography, as well as those with a broader interest in literacy, communication, language contact, and language change.
The book contains chapters written by May Ahmar (Linguistics Ph.D. candidate), Wafa Bahri (Ph.D. '19, Linguistics), Eric Chambers (Ph.D. '17, Linguistics), and Michelle McSweeney (Ph.D. ‘16, Linguistics)
Published November 2022

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