Department of Linguistics

Welcome to the Department of Linguistics.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, from the sounds and gestures of speech up to the organization of words, sentences, and meaning. Linguistics is also concerned with the relationship between language and cognition, society, and history.

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.

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 history of these developments, from triggering events to driving forces and endpoints. It explores the major insights obtained by combining sociolinguistics with the results of dialect geography on a large scale; demonstrates under what conditions dialects diverge from one another; and establishes an essential distinction between transmission within the community and diffusion across communities.

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 where traditional approaches to historical linguistics have failed to produce satisfying results, and that the results of historical research can have an impact on theory. The book first explains the nature of human language and the sources of language change in broad terms. It then focuses on different types of language change from contemporary viewpoints, before exploring comparative reconstruction — the most spectacular success of traditional historical linguistics — and the problems inherent in trying to devise new methods for linguistic comparison. Positioned at the cutting edge of the field, the book argues that this approach can and should lead to the re-integration of historical linguistics as one of the core areas in the study of language.

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. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America.

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. A central claim is that voice is encoded in a functional projection, VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP. Legate further claims that VoiceP may be associated with phi-features that semantically restrict the external argument position but do not saturate it. Through minor variations in the properties of VoiceP, Legate explains a wide range of non-canonical voice constructions, including: agent-agreeing passives, grammatical object passives, impersonals, object voice constructions, and applicative voice in causatives. Her analysis draws on data from a typologically diverse set of languages, not only Malayo-Polynesian, but also Celtic, Scandinavian, and Slavic.

Voice and v provides a detailed investigation into the syntactic structure of an understudied Malayo-Polynesian language, and thereby reveals important insights for the theoretical analysis of voice and the verb phrase. Moreover, the work applies and broadens these insights to a range of related passive-like constructions crosslinguistically. Voice and v thus joins a handful of model volumes that enlist typological depth and breadth to further our development of modern linguistic 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. Often irreverent and hilarious, these brief essays take on many sacred cows. Language Log is a site where serious professional linguists go to have fun. There's plenty of fun and plenty to get you thinking about language in new ways in this collection.

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. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

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