Department of Linguistics faculty members are engaged in a wide variety of fascinating research projects that are yielding important new insights about human interactions.
Like all linguists, computational linguists are interested in human language. But the methods they use to study natural language set them apart. They study language in the context of computation, which often involves programming machines to do some sort of Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Georgia Zellou and Mohamed Afkir are leading an innovative research and teaching initiative that explores the phonetics and phonology of Tarifit, a Moroccan Amazigh language, while advancing inclusive language technology design. Their work investigates typologically rare structures, speaker variation, and adaptation in human–robot interaction, with implications for sound change theory, models of speech production and perception, and inclusive AI development.
My current project is an investigation in the history of linguistics. In particular, my project looks at the concept of “ergativity”, and how it emerged as a general concept out of disparate observations across language families. Ergativity is a phenomenon that fascinates linguists from the first time they come across it in graduate school and beyond. For those that do not know what ergativity is, it is an alignment system in which the objects of transitive verbs behave or are coded like the subjects of intransitive verbs.
Dr. Emily Morgan is, by definition, a computational psycholinguist, so her work lies at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and computer science. As such, she currently has a couple projects that fit these themes perfectly.
The primary strand of my research looks at how the structure of complex words (such as those with prefixes or suffixes) impacts the way people learn, conceptualize, or perceive these words. The goal is to uncover how language users store and process information encoded within the structure of words. A number of projects are ongoing in this area, including recently published work (Lawyer et al. (2024)) looking at the conceptualization of noun class prefixes in Kinyarwanda (a Bantu language of Rwanda).
Jack (John) Hawkins has three research projects currently ongoing or near completion. Read about it now!
(1) A project on historical linguistics with Luna Filipović entitled "Contact-induced language change and its constraints in relation to actuation", investigates the role of contact and multilingualism in bringing about language change. The abstract follows:
