Spell-Out Blog
Week of October 26
Visiting Speaker Adam Aleksic Viral TikTok influencer, author of Algospeak , and former Linguistics concentrator Adam Aleksic '23 (@etymologynerd) will be visiting the department to speak on "The Semiotics of Slop": how brainrot and social media slop...
Week of October 19
Jane Loney Presents at NELS This weekend, graduate student Jane Loney presented at the NELS (North East Linguistic Society) conference in New York. Her poster titled "LDA without Movement in Zulu" was based on her syntactic research on cross-clausal...
Week of October 13
M&M Lab Featured in THURJ As part of a project for LING10, Caroline Song '29 interviewed Kathryn Davidson for the Harvard Undergraduate Research Journal (THURJ). In a wide-ranging conversation, they discussed Kate's research in the field of semantics as...
Week of October 5
PhonLab Visiting Speaker On Friday, October 9 at 10:30am-12:00pm , Christian DiCanio (University at Buffalo) will present at PhonLab on "Lenition flipped on its head: the phonetics of medial strengthening in Mixtecan languages" ( see abstract ). After the...
Week of September 28
Georgian Fieldwork at MIT's Fox Fest On Saturday, Prof. Tanya Bondarenko and alum of the department Richard Luo (PhD, Yale) gave a talk called "Interpreting Clausal Movement" at Fox Fest, a syntax workshop at MIT in honor of Danny Fox. Their research...
Week of September 21
Colloquium with Ryan Bochnak Semanticist and fieldwork researcher Ryan Bochnak of the University of British Columbia joins us this week for our first Linguistics Department Colloquium of the semester. The talk will be held on Friday, September 25 at 12:00...
Week of September 14
Fall Reception Reminder that our Fall Reception will be held on Tuesday, September 15 from 4:00-6:00pm in the Boylston 3rd floor lounge. Come mix and mingle with our faculty, graduate students, undergraduate concentrators, and potential future...
Week of September 8
Summer Research With the WOLF Lab In June, members of Dr. Tanya Bondarenko’s WOLF Lab traveled to the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in East Texas to conduct fieldwork on the Muskogean language Alabama. Dr. Bondarenko, Ava Silva ('27), Jackson Herrera ('27...
Week of August 31
Welcome new members of the department! This fall, the Linguistics Department welcomes two first-year graduate students and two new faculty lecturers. If you see them around Boylston, be sure to say hello! Neng Wan - Graduate Student (semantics, pragmatics...
Week of August 10
We're pleased to announce the Ph.D. defenses of: Jack Rabinovitch "The Speech Report: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation into the Compositional Semantics of Reported Speech" Tuesday, August 11, 2026 1:00-3:30pm 1st Floor Boylston Hall - Fong Auditorium...
Week of Apr 27
Hande Sevgi Thesis Defence Hande Sevgi is defending her thesis ' Manner Modification Across Modalities: Insights from Gesture, Sign, and Spoken Language' this Thursday, April 30 at 10:00–12:30 in Boylston 105. Refreshments immediately following the...
Week of Apr 20
Daria Bikina Thesis Defence Daria Bikina is defending her thesis ' Fine-tuning (in)definiteness in the absence of articles: Experimental investigation of Russian' this Wednesday, April 22 at 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm in Sever 202. A hybrid option is available...