The Program in Linguistics, while small, has experienced a dramatic increase in interest from students representing departments across campus. The field appeals to students who like unraveling ...

Lenition, a pervasive phonetic phenomenon, involves the systematic weakening or alteration of consonant sounds in contextual speech environments. This process, which may result in fully articulated ...

Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought that originally began to emerge in the 1970s due to dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language. As I explain in my book, ...

John A. Goldsmith is intrigued by the life of a linguistics giant who felt himself to be a failure. “Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats,” wrote George Orwell. Each ...

Sifting through two-thirds of the world’s languages, scientists have discovered a strange pattern: Words with the same meanings in different languages often seem to share the same sounds — even when ...

The study of linguistic cognition takes you into the heart of the mind. Cognitive linguists examine the language that we use to tell stories, describe feelings and sensory experiences, collaborate ...

Like learning math, from simple counting to solving complex equations, language learning happens in a similar stepwise fashion, with each new step building on previous knowledge. Brown (1973) outlines ...

Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem attempted to break the impasse by bringing together findings from linguistics, psychology, genetics, neuroscience, and animal communication.