News Highlights
- The National Science Foundation has awarded Jürgen Bohnemeyer the research grant #0723694 "Spatial language and cognition in Mesoamerica", with a total budget of $250,000, a duration of 42 months, and a start date of November 1, 2007. This project is a comparative study of the representation of space in 15 indigenous languages of Guatemala and Mexico. It focuses on two unusual traits of spatial language in Mesoamerica, highly productive terminologies for object parts defined in geometric terms and a preference for "allocentric" (i.e.,non-observer-based) frames of reference.
- Roger Woodard received the Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2006 award for his book "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages".
- Jeff Good has been the recipient of two recent NEH grants under the Documenting Endangered Languages program to fund documentary and descriptive work on two groups of underdescribed languages of the Northwest Province of Cameroon, the Western Beboid languages and the moribund languages of the Furu Awa subdivision. This work will produce the first comprehensive descriptive materials on the grammar and lexicon of these languages.
- Heike Lehnert received an NIH postdoctoral fellowship for the Center for Language Sciences at the U of R. The PI of the NIH training grant is Mike Tannenhaus and her faculty sponsor is Joyce McDonough.
- Jenn Cornish received the Raymond H. Stetson Scholarship in Phonetics and Speech Sciences (for 2006), awarded by Acoustical Society of America.
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);