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Skip to main content University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences College of Arts & Sciences Graduate Division College of Liberal and Professional Studies Department of Linguistics Toggle navigation Main navigation People Faculty Staff Students Postdocs Visiting Scholars Alumni Undergraduate Undergraduate Major (Through the Class of 2018) Undergraduate Major (As of the Class of 2019) Minor in Linguistics Minor in ASL Courses Requirements Fulfilled By Linguistics Courses Hoenigswald Prize pliŋ Graduate Application Current Students Financial Aid GradLingS Language and Communication Sciences (LCS) Master’s Degree Procedures Recent Dissertations Rules Courses Research Events Upcoming Events Past Events Recent Events Recurring Events PWPL Submitting Articles Volumes Resources Contact Search Department of Linguistics - Home About the Department 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. Events Upcoming Events Recurring Events Pagination Current page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Next page 1 / 5 Mar 05 2020 ASL Lecture Series event for Spring 2020: Dr. Joseph Hill “The Past, Present, and Future of Black ASL” Mar 5, 2020 at 5:00pm - 6:30pm | Meyerson Hall, B-1. The ASL Program in the Department … Mar 06 2020 ASL Workshop: "Building Connections with ASL Corpora" Mar 6, 2020 at 10:00am - 12:30pm | Location: T.B.D. Jami Fisher, Julie Hochgesang (Gallaudet) and Meredith Tamminga are delighted to be hosting an ILST-funded workshop called "Building Connections wi Mar 07 2020 2020 Spring Term Break: March 7th -- 15th Mar 7, 2020 - Mar 15, 2020 (All Day) Pagination Current page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Next page 1 / 5 Department News BBC article by Gareth Roberts Jan 24, 2020 Read More Milena Šereikaitė receives 2nd place in LSA's 2020 Student Abstract Award Sep 11, 2019 Read More Jami Fisher teaches at the Penn Global Seminar Jul 17, 2019 Read More Lena Greenberg receives the 2019 Hoenigswald Prize May 6, 2019 Read More Ryan Budnick receives a Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students. May 2, 2019 Read More Penn linguists featured in an article on the Philly Accent Feb 15, 2019 Read More Joseph William Butkiewicz receives the 2018 Hoenigswald Prize Apr 30, 2018 Read More Jami Fisher receives teaching award Apr 30, 2018 Read More Phi Beta Kappa inductees Apr 23, 2018 Read More Charles Yang awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship Apr 5, 2018 Read More 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 Learn More 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? Learn More 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. Learn More 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. Learn More 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. Learn More 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 Learn More 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. Learn More 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. Learn More 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 Learn More 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 Learn More 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 Learn More 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 Learn More 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 Learn More Subscribe to our mailing list Contact Us Department of Linguistics 3401-C Walnut Street, Suite 300, C Wing University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 aforsyth@ling.upenn.edu (215) 898-6046 David Embick Department Chair Eugene Buckley Graduate Chair Florian Schwarz Undergraduate Chair Amy Forsyth Program Coordinator College of Arts & Sciences Graduate Division College of Liberal & Professional Studies © 2020 The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Penn Weblogin...