5th October 2026 12:20 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

Faolan and Yao will give practice presentations for AMP 2026 (Annual Meeting on Phonology 2026), which will be held October 9-22, 2026 at the University of Maryland, College Park.  

7th October 2026 12:20 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

Sam and Abby will provide advice on job interview preparation.

8th October 2026 04:30 PM

Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Juergen Bohnemeyer

The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Juergen Bohnemeyer, Professor of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo.  

Dr. Bohnemeyer will speak on "Functional expressions: Typology and evolution".

Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.

Abstract:

This paper explores a typological puzzle: some functional expressions – e.g., expressions of negation, demonstratives, pro-forms, quantificational and modal expressions – are near-universally present in the languages of the world, whereas others, including definite articles and the traditional inflectional categories of tense, gender, case, and so on – vary drastically in their presence, with most types occurring very roughly in between one third and two thirds of human languages only.

What causes such distributional disparities? I argue that the answer lies in distinct communicative functions: the near-universally available expressions serve to encode parts of the speaker’s intended message, whereas the more variably distributed expressions have an ancillary function in facilitating the hearer’s inferences about the speaker’s communicative intent.

I propose a classification of functional expressions that takes into account discourse prominence (Boye & Harder 2012) and semantic type. I then sketch an evolutionary model of grammaticalization that includes a selective process sensitive to communicative fitness, contra Croft (2000). An empirically testable prediction of this model is that pragmatically overlapping types of functional expressions such as tense, viewpoint aspect and mood or indexing and  lagging (Haspelmath 2019) should show evidence of partial complementarity in typological distributions due to tradeoff.

I am currently studying the evidence for such tradeoff relations in the Grambank database (Skirgård et al. 2023) in collaboration with Hedvig Skirgård (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) and Scott Claessens (University of Bristol). I will summarize the current state of this project. 

References

• *Boye, K. & P. Harder. (2012). A usage-based theory of grammaticalization and grammatical status. Language 88(1): 1-44.
• *Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
• *Haspelmath, M. (2019). Indexing and flagging, and head and dependent marking. Te Reo 62(1): 93-115.
• *Skirgård, H. et al. (2023). Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Adances 9: eadg6175.

Bio:

Juergen specializes in semantic typology, the crosslinguistic study of universals and variation in semantic categorization. Semantic typologists investigate how languages vary and resemble one another in how they represent reality. He has conducted extensive research on the semantic typology of representations of space, time, events, and causality and on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, according to which language-specificity in semantics may be a shaping factor in culture-specificity in nonverbal cognition.

An overarching theme of his research is the role of culture in cognition. He views this interest as part of a broader empiricist turn in the cognitive sciences. This paradigm shift or paradigm maturation process has been leading the field slowly away from its rationalist beginnings, which were heavily invested in assumptions of innateness, symbolic encoding, and modularity, toward a "Cognitive Science 2.0" that embraces individual and cultural variation and brain plasticity. 

A closely related line of inquiry, which he has persued since the days of his doctoral research, is the emergence of functional categories in the languages of the world. Across space and time, unrelated languages have been evolving similar functional categories. Yet, the amount of observable crosslinguistic variation in the grammaticalization of such categories discourages simplistic innatist explanations. He has been developing an evolutionary approach that attributes crosslinguistic similarities in functional category systems to processes of cultural evolution responding to pressures of optimizing communication.

23rd October 2026 08:00 AM

CNY Language Sound Structure Meeting: Workshop on Tone in Speech Corpora

We will travel to Syracuse University for the two-day CNY Language Sound Structure Meeting of the LIN10 Workshop on Tone in Speech Corpora.  LIN10 will focus on methodologies for studying tone in speech corpora, with a goal of discussing and debating current and newly developed tools and best practices in their implementation.

On Friday (Noon to 5:30PM)  we will meet in room 500 in the Hall of Languages, where invited speaker Kathryn Franich (Harvard University) will share  tools developed in her lab to study tonal prominences and their intersection with speech rhythm.

On Saturday in Kittredge Auditorium (10:00AM to 5:00PM), we will have a series of short talks and roundtable discussions centered upon the workshop’s overarching theme of tonal phonology.

This workshop is funded and made possible by the CNY Humanities Corridor. More information can be found at https://www.cnycorridor.net/. We thank the CNY corridor for making this event possible. We are also grateful to SU’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics for making their spaces available for use during the event.