Harvard Linguistics

05/13/2026

ASL in The Crimson

The Crimson published a fantastic article about our ASL program! Check it out here:

I am two months into Harvard’s ASL 1 course, and I’ve finally racked up enough signs and confidence to clumsily string together a few complete sentences at our morning ASL coffee chat.

05/07/2026

Senior Thesis Colloquium 2026

Many congratulations to all of our senior thesis writers who presented their work on May 1! Writing a thesis is a major achievement, and we are so proud of the hard work, creativity, and intellectual curiosity that went into these projects.

This year's senior thesis writers include:
Sam Lyczkowski — Al-Af‘āl Al-Rubā‘īyah: The Rise of Quadriradical Verbs in Arabic
Annie Raschella — Acoustic and Affective Correlates of L2 Development: Prosodic, Psychological, and Physiological Variation in L2 Spanish
Simon Ma — JKL: Japanese and Korean demonstratives in humans and LLMs

Well done, everyone!

(Photo credit: Anabelle Caso)

05/04/2026

Spring Reception 2026

The Department of Linguistics held its Spring Reception on Friday, May 1. Faculty, graduate students, undergraduate concentrators, and visitors gathered for a lunch filled with conversation and celebration. A special highlight was a speech by our Interim Chair, Gennaro Chierchia, delivered in the role for the final time!

Many thanks to everyone who joined us! Have a lovely summer!

(Photo credit: Kate Pilson)

05/01/2026

Hande Sevgi Thesis Defence

Well done to Hande Sevgi on the successful defence of her PhD!

It’s a busy graduation season in the department, with defences coming thick and fast, and we’re thrilled to celebrate Hande’s terrific achievement. On April 30, final-year student Hande-Sevgi successfully defended her dissertation ‘Manner Modification Across Modalities: Insights from Gesture, Sign, and Spoken Language’, which brings together evidence across spoken languages, co-speech gestures, and sign languages to shed new light on how manner is expressed and interpreted.

Many congratulations, Dr. Sevgi! 🥳

04/23/2026

Daria Bikina Thesis Defence

Warm congratulations to the final-year student Daria Bikina on successfully defending her PhD.

We’re delighted to celebrate this milestone, and all the work that led to her dissertation, ‘Fine-tuning (in)definiteness in the absence of articles: Experimental investigation of Russian’. We would also like to thank all her collaborators along the way.

Please join us in congratulating Dr Bikina🥳

04/17/2026

Whatmough Lecture by Diane Lillo-Martin

The Nineteenth Annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture was held on Monday, 13 April 2026. The speaker this year was Diane Lillo-Martin (Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of Connecticut), who gave a talk titled ‘Sign Language Acquisition: A Linguistic Right’. The talk was very well attended, attracting students, faculty, and researchers from linguistics, psychology, and related fields in the Boston area.

In the lecture, Prof. Lillo-Martin reviewed evidence that sign languages such as ASL are acquired in the same ways as spoken languages when children have access to fluent input. She also discussed how most DHH children are raised by hearing parents, and how an approach that includes ASL and the Deaf community alongside spoken language (bimodal bilingualism) supports a strong case for the linguistic right to sign.

Thank you so much, Diane, for giving such a wonderful lecture and for a thoughtful and engaging discussion. 🤩

04/13/2026

19th Annual Joshua and Verona Taylor Whatmough Lecture 🎓

The Department of Linguistics is proud to present the 19th Annual Joshua and Verona Taylor Whatmough Lecture. This year, our speaker is Diane Lillo-Martin, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. We encourage you to join us for this exciting talk!

Title: Sign Language Acquisition: A Linguistic Right

Speaker: Diane Lillo-Martin, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut

Time: Monday, April 13, 2026 at 4:00pm

Location: Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall (in-person only)

Reception to follow in the Department on the third floor

Abstract: The natural sign languages of deaf communities, such as American Sign Language (ASL), are acquired in the same ways that spoken languages are acquired – that is, when children are exposed to fluent input by their caregivers. This means that deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children raised by deaf, signing parents go through similar milestones of language development as hearing children do. However, only a small fraction of DHH children have parents who know and use a sign language. The vast majority of DHH children are raised by hearing parents, who usually have no knowledge of a sign language or deaf community when their children are born. Due to various misconceptions about sign languages, and a desire to prioritize the development of spoken languages, many hearing parents are discouraged from signing with their DHH child. However, even with novice signing parents, these children can benefit from an approach that includes ASL and the deaf community in addition to spoken language: an approach known as bimodal bilingualism. This presentation summarizes the evidence that makes the case for the linguistic right to sign.

ASL interpretation provided.
______

Diane Lillo-Martin is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Her main research interest is to better understand the human language faculty. Primarily, she examines this by studying the structure and acquisition of American Sign Language, and by looking at the process of language acquisition across different languages.

03/30/2026

4th Annual Graduate Student Workshop 🎓

The Department of Linguistics hosted its 4th Annual Graduate Student Workshop last Friday, March 27, 2026. The workshop brought together graduate students and faculties for a day of short talks, discussion, and conversation across subfields.

This year’s programme featured five presentations, with topics ranging from logic-enriched semantics to Indo-European morphosyntax and phonology. We are grateful to all of the presenters for sharing their work in such a collegial and constructive setting:

- Natasha Thalluri (G5): ‘Two classes of Georgian indefinites’
- Nofar Rimon (G3): ‘Understanding Kazakh men: Comitatives revisited’
- Claire Rong (visiting grad student): ‘An impossibility theorem of aggregating semantic rankings under non-monotonic quantification’
- Ellora Rich (G1): ‘The Middle Voice: Sanskrit, PIE, and Beyond’
- Hillary Small (G1): ‘Quantitative Metathesis and Vowel Hiatus Resolution in Attic Greek’

We would also like to thank all the presenters for sharing their excellent research with the rest of the department, and all the audience for coming along, asking thoughtful questions, and contributing to such a supportive atmosphere.

Finally, thank you to the organisers for choosing the lovely new venue and for the admin staff for ordering the delicious food.

03/26/2026

Senior Thesis Writers 2026

Congratulations to all of our Linguistics senior thesis writers for completing their theses by the Spring Break. Completing a thesis is a major achievement, and we are so proud of all the hard work, care, and intellectual curiosity that went into these projects. Here is a list of the senior thesis writers and their preliminary titles:

- Samuel Lyczkowski: "Al-Af‘āl Al-Rubā‘īyah: The Rise of Quadriradical Verbs in Arabic"
- Pei Yao Simon Ma: "JKL: Japanese and Korean demonstratives in humans and LLMs"
- Annmarie Raschella: "Acoustic and Affective Correlates of L2 Development: Prosodic, Psychological, and Physiological Variation in L2 Spanish"

Well done, everyone! We all look forward to hearing more about your research in April at the Senior Thesis Colloquium!

03/20/2026

Julie Anne Legate at the Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series

Many thanks to Julie Anne Legate for a brilliant Harvard Linguistics Colloquium talk on 13 March! In her talk ‘Bridge Verbs within a Null Theory of Movement’, she drew on corpus and experimental data from English and Mandarin to revisit the bridge verb phenomenon within a theory of lexical learning and generalisation and proposed that children assume that no movement is possible until they receive evidence in the input that it is.

Thank you, Julie, for a fascinating and thought-provoking talk! 👏🔥

03/12/2026

ECO-5 at Harvard

The Department of Linguistics at Harvard held this year's ECO-5 conference on Saturday, March 7. Three students from our department gave wonderful presentations:
- Nofar Rimon (G3): Understanding Kazakh '-men': Comitatives revisited
- Jane Loney (G2): The Typology of Voice in Nguni
- Hrefna Svavarsdóttir (G2): The Old Icelandic 'what' partitive construction

Huge congratulations to our fantastic presenters and the intellectual food! And thanks so much, Jane and Nofar, for organising the conference and providing actual food!

About: ECO-5 is a group consisting of five East Coast universities (UMass, MIT, Harvard, UConn & UMD). The conference is a venue for graduate students to present their current, original work usually in syntax (but not necessarily so).

(Photo credit: Nofar Rimon)