News Highlights

  • Jennifer Wilson, a student in the Ph.D. program, has won the Linguistic Society of America's Student Abstract Award for her abstract, Evidence for Infixation after the First Syllable: Data from a Papuan Language, to be presented at the LSA 2012 Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon.
  • Jürgen Bohnemeyer has been awarded a grant of $255,901 by the National Science Foundation for a follow-up project to his ongoing MesoSpace project, titled "Spatial language and cognition beyond Mesoamerica" (BCS-1053123). The new project will run 2011 - 2014 and is dedicated to the investigation of the representation of space in 25 languages spoken on five continents.
  • Jesse Lovegren, a student in the Ph.D. program, has been awarded a fellowship from the Linguistic Society of America to attend the 2011 Linguistic Institute.
  • Hiroto Uchihara, a student in the Ph.D. program, has been awarded a 10 Week Graduate Student Fellowship appointment from the Smithsonian Institution, to work with UB Linguistics Ph.D. alumna Gabriela Perez-Baez on the tonal phonology of San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec.
  • Emily Glenn-Smith, who coodinates our ASL program, has been accepted into a new pilot MA program in ASL Teaching at Gallaudet University. She recently received her national American Sign Language Teachers Association Certification.

Please see the News Page for more details on these and other stories.

Support the Department

We welcome contributions to augment our support of student excellence in Linguistics.

  • Wolfgang Wölck Student Travel Fund
  • Student Summer Research Fund

Introduction to the Department

The Department of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo offers training in a broad range of sub-disciplines of linguistics. Students benefit from the faculty's research specializations in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics, phonology, as well as language typology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and historical and contact linguistics. Areas of particular strength are:

  • Syntactic and semantic typology;
  • Semantics, including lexical/conceptual and formal approaches, and pragmatics;
  • Field-based language documentation and description (particularly of languages of the Americas, Africa, and New Guinea);
  • Psycholinguistics (including corpus-based, experimental, and computational modeling research);
The department has long championed approaches to the study of language that are data-driven and informed by diverse theoretical perspectives under a broad Cognitive Science umbrella.

Major, Recurring, and Cognitive Science Events