About the Department
The Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania is the oldest modern linguistics department in the United States, founded by Zellig Harris in 1947. The department is known for its interdisciplinary research, spanning many subfields of linguistics, as well as integration of theory, corpus research, field work, and cognitive and computer science.
The department has both a graduate Ph.D. program and undergraduate major and minors. For the specializations of our faculty, please see the research section.
Department News
Faculty Bookshelf
Revealing Structure; Papers in Honor of Larry M. Hyman
Drawing from a wide range of perspectives in the analysis of grammatical structures, the papers collected in this book are unified not by linguistic subfield, but by the investigative method they e
The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language
All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition?
Voice and v. Lessons from Acehnese
In Voice and v, Julie Anne Legate investigates the syntactic structure of voice, using Acehnese as the empirical starting point.
Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions
This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory.
Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log
Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum collect some of their most insightful and amusing material from Language Log, their popular website.
The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Drawing on cutting-edge developments in biology, neurology, psychology, and linguistics, Charles Yang's The Infinite Gift takes us inside the astonishingly complex but largely subconscio
From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic
This book is the first since 1897 to describe the earliest reconstructable stages of the prehistory of English.
Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change
The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada.
Localism Versus Globalism in Morphology and Phonology
This book is the first detailed examination of morphology and phonology from a phase-cyclic point of view (that is, one that takes into account recent developments in Distributed Morphology and t
Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume III, Cognitive and Cultural Factors
This volume, which completes Labov’s seminal Principles of Linguistic Change trilogy, examines the cognitive and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change, tracing the life hist
Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory
In this book Robin Clark explains in an accessible manner the usefulness of game theory in thinking about a wide range of issues in linguistics. Clark argues that we use grammar strategically to
Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change
This book examines the diversity among American dialects and presents the counterintuitive finding that geographically localized dialects of North American English are increasingly diverging from
Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration
Bringing the advances of theoretical linguistics to the study of language change in a systematic way, this innovative textbook shows that theoretical linguistics can be used to solve problems whe