Yale Linguistics Department

04/04/2026

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01/13/2026

Yale Linguistics had a great showing at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans! We also had a reunion.
Presenters included current graduate students, faculty, alumni and collaborators:

Talks:

Lenition at left edges: interactions with phonological domains (Natalie Weber)
Cyclic Reduplication in O’odham: A Stratal OT Account of Double Reduplication (Jeremy Johns)
Pseudogapping Parameters (Yuyang Liu, co-authored with Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee)
Speech-based Generative AI for Low Resource Languages: Promises and Pitfalls (Claire Bowern, Alessio Tossolini)
Articulatory movement and coordination under prosodic modulation in English and Mandarin (Mike Stern, Jason Shaw)
Varieties of scalar exclusives (Ka-Fai Yip)
Objects and nothingness: Applicative-licensed nominal ellipsis (Yuyang Liu)
Concatenation occurs one morpheme at a time: Infixation in Choctaw (Dani Katenkamp, Finn Amber)
Does the Williams Cycle apply to Mandarin Chinese? (Ka-Fai Yip, co-authored with Fulang Chen)

Posters:

Tracing metonymic extensions of manner of motion verbs through diachrony (Teresa Borneo, Claire Bowern)
When is ‘or not’ required in an embedded polar question? (Richard Luo)
A Cognitive Bias for Individuation in Linguistic ‘mass’/‘count’ Uses Underlies Diachronic Trajectories of ‘Portioning’ and ‘Grinding’ Readings (Alessandra Pintado-Urbanc, Maria Piñango)
Where Indigenous language revitalization and dominant L2 instruction meet: converging on the Indigenous pedagogy (Jeremy Johns, Elena Koulidobrova)

01/13/2026

The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

12/21/2025

Yalies going to the LSA! We will be having a reunion/meetup on Friday morning, 8am, at the Canal St Pantry (cafe in the hotel). Hope to see you there!

11/23/2025

The NYT did a nice profile of Stephen Anderson:

In “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion,” he argued that language is a biological system unique to humans, despite the widespread belief that it extended to other animals.

11/18/2025

11/18/2025

Last Thursday, a select group of students in the Directed Independent Language Study (DILS) and Fields programs came together to share their accomplishments and discuss best practices for effective language acquisition when navigating Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs).

11/18/2025

It’s here! The 2026 LSA Annual Meeting Program is live!

Huge thanks to everyone who submitted abstracts, the 200+ reviewers, and the 2026 Program Committee for making this possible! Start planning your New Orleans experience! We can’t wait to see you there! https://web.cvent.com/event/d453188a-a321-46d4-b57e-79d5067e6521/websitePage:0fce7914-bbae-47fb-991c-3050b18e5787

11/18/2025

The Department of Linguistics at Yale University is looking to hire a Lecturer in Historical Linguistics, with a 3-year appointment, beginning July 1, 2026. The Lecturer will offer introductory and advanced courses and advise student research in historical linguistics/language change at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The teaching expectation is normally 4 courses per academic year, plus advising responsibilities. The focus of the courses would be historical linguistics/language change, but the Lecturer will also offer other courses that help us meet the needs of our curriculum, which will be determined based on their areas of expertise.
The position is open as to specialization within historical linguistics. We particularly welcome applications from people whose work focuses on sound change, Indigenous or endangered languages, and/or quantitative approaches to language change.

Qualifications
The appointee must hold a Ph.D. or equivalent degree or have completed all requirements for the Ph.D. by the time this appointment starts.

Application Instructions
Applicants should submit an application through Interfolio at this link: https://apply.interfolio.com/177395

Applications should include the following materials:
1. a cover letter
2. a current CV
3. a teaching statement
4. a research statement
5. three representative pieces of research
6. the names and email addresses of three referees
7. evidence of teaching and advising excellence, such as syllabi or course evaluations

Timeline: To ensure full consideration, applications should be submitted by December 20, 2025. Review of applications will begin shortly thereafter. Later applications may be considered until the position is filled.

Contact information:
• for information about the position: Claire Bowern, Search Committee Chair
• for application assistance: Julie Kinsella, Sr Administrative Assistant

10/30/2025

The department has now published a longer remembrance of Steve Anderson's career. We focused on the many career highlights but also very much miss his excellence sense of humor, culinary artistry, among many other things

Stephen R. Anderson, Dorothy R. Diebold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, who taught at Yale from 1994 until his retirement in 2017, died October 13, 2025 in Asheville, North Carolina.

10/16/2025

The Yale Linguistics department is delighted to honor its distinguished alumnus, Samuel Jay Keyser ‘62 PhD, who is being awarded the Graduate School of Arts and Science’s Wilbur Cross medal. On ths occasion of this award, Professor Keyser will be coming to the Yale campus to present a public lecture and interact with members of the Yale community. Keyser, who is currently Professor Emeritus at MIT, has been a leading figure in the field of linguistics for more than 60 years, having made fundamental contributions to phonology, morphology, and syntax. He has also shaped the field through his leadership of the journal Linguistic Inquiry, which he founded in 1970 and which he has edited ever since. His recent interests include the intersection of linguistics and the arts, and he will be exploring this topic in his public lecture “Play it Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts,” on Monday, October 20 at 4:00 pm in Kline Tower, Room 101 (219 Prospect Street).

10/15/2025

The Yale Department of Linguistics is saddened at the news that our longtime colleague Stephen R. Anderson has died. Steve was a member of the Department from 1994 until his retirement in 2017 and profoundly shaped both the department and linguistics. He was a leader in the department, President of the Linguistic Society of America, Vice-President in the CiPL, and a profound influence on many in the field. In addition to his influential, insightful and meticulous work in phonology and morphology, he was a popular teacher on language evolution and animal communication. His work bridged phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, linguistic fieldwork, and cognitive science and his contribution to our understanding of language was profound. We will miss him deeply.
The photo below was taken at the symposium held in honor of Steve's retirement, where he was presented with a Festschrift "On Looking into Words" https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/151