Linguistics (PhD)

Graduate School

Program Website

Graduate Field

Linguistics

Program Description

The interests of the faculty cover a wide range of areas in theoretical and experimental linguistics. The field's graduate program covers all facets of linguistics, as well as an exceptionally broad spectrum of courses dealing with computational linguistics, field methods and historical linguistics. All graduate students in the field are enrolled in the Ph.D. program.

Research Facilities: The department offers state-of-the-art facilities for research in phonetics, including articulatory movement tracking, ultrasound, electroglottography, and speech aerodynamics. The phonetics lab is part of the Cornell Speech Imaging Group (SIG), a cross-disciplinary team of researchers using real-time magnetic resonance imaging to study the dynamics of speech articulation. The department also hosts a Computational Linguistics Lab which focuses on statistical parsing of large data samples, including grammar development, parameter estimation, and acquisition of lexical information from corpora. The Language Documentation Lab provides resources and laboratory space for research involving language documentation, description, and analysis, with an emphasis on understudied languages. The Interface Research Lab focuses on understanding the interfaces between phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Concentrations

  • Computational linguistics (minor)
  • East Asian linguistics (minor)
  • English linguistics (minor)
  • General linguistics
  • Germanic linguistics (minor)
  • Indo-European linguistics (minor)
  • Phonetics (minor)
  • Phonological theory (minor)
  • Second language acquisition (minor)
  • Semantics (minor)
  • Slavic linguistics (minor)
  • Southeast Asian Linguistics (minor)
  • Syntactic theory (minor)