Linguistics Program - School of Arts & Sciences

Linguistics at Richmond is an interdisciplinary minor that studies the system of language as a medium of cognition and perception as well as a social institution. Engaging in linguistic analysis enables students to view culture through the lens of language. Language can be studied at multiple levels: phonetics and phonology (sounds), morphology (words), syntax (sentences), and semantics and pragmatics (meaning). Faculty at Richmond investigate each of these levels in courses that take different analytical perspectives: applied linguistics, computational linguistics, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics. These courses address a variety of topics, including language change, language and cognition, and language and society (gender, class, race/ethnicity).

Program News

Tess Monks, '20 was selected as one of Harvard’s newest Presidential Scholars after being accepted into several of the world’s premier Ph.D. programs for historical linguistics. Read more about Tess's accomplishments here.

Beginning in Spring 2020, Classics Professor Dieter Gunkel will offer an Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics (CLSC 252). The course fulfils the Field of Study: Historical Studies (FSHT) requirement.

Linguistics students are well employed according to recent study

In Fall 2019, Prof. Giancaspro's "Spanish for Heritage Speakers" course was officially approved by Arts & Sciences. Starting in Fall 2020, Spanish for Heritage Speakers, which counts for the LALIS major and minor, will be taught every fall semester as LAIS 310: Spanish for Heritage Speakers.

In Spring 2020, Prof. Giancaspro taught LAIS 497: "Bilingual Education in the US," an upper-level linguistics seminar that focused on child bilingualism, dual immersion education, and obstacles to educational equality for Spanish-speaking students in the United States.

In Fall 2020, Prof. Giancaspro is teaching LAIS 497: "Spanglish", a linguistics seminar that teaches students not only to identify the variety of bilingual practices commonly known as Spanglish but also to appreciate the subtle and sophisticated ways in which bilingual speakers produce (and comprehend) them. Guest speakers this semester include Dr. Jorge Valdés Kroff (University of Florida), as well as Dr. Jonathan Rosa (Stanford University).

Linguistics Feature Stories

Josh Higdon, '22: Finding Passion Through Research

Alongside University of Richmond’s Assistant Professor of Spanish, David Giancaspro, and Silvia Perez-Cortes, of Rutgers University–Camden, Higdon was the only undergraduate student to present a paper at the conference.

Aalok Sathe, '21

Aalok Sathe, '21, is interested in how the brain understands, processes, and produces language.

Tom Francis, '18Tom Francis, '18, will enroll in the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classics this fall at the University of Pennsylvania. Tom’s undergraduate thesis, "Problems of Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek: Elucidating the Aspectual Meaning of the Perfect through a Study of Participles in Mark and 1 Corinthians,” was recognized with the A&S Symposium Paper Competition Award.

Tess Monks, '20

Tess Monks, '20, is heading to Oxford to study Classical Linguistics with two top-notch specialists, Philomen Probert and Wolfgang de Melo, during her year abroad. When she returns, professors Gunkel and Arnold will work with her on a project at the interface of Classics and quantitative corpus Linguistics.

Isabel Benvenuti, '18Congratulations to Isabel Benvenuti, '18, who will begin a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures this fall at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her LALIS major research project was entitled “Transfer in third language acquisition.”

Exposing students to etymology

Students use games to teach Greek and Latin etymology at a local after-school program.

Emily Gove, '17

Helping produce a video for Zagat provided a fun, informative, and delicious experience for a junior majoring in anthropology.

Young Brinson, '15

Research becomes personal for Native American student who looked at whether federal recognition helps native tribes feel empowered to define their identity.

Faculty Highlights

Lowder & Undergraduate Students Published
Matthew Lowder, assistant professor of psychology, along with three undergraduate student co-authors, published the article "Effects of Syntactic Structure on the Processing of Lexical Repetition During Sentence Reading" in Memory & Cognition.
Arnold Awarded
Photogrammar, a project led by Taylor Arnold, associate professor of statistics; and Lauren Tilton, associate professor of digital humanities; along with colleagues in the Digital Scholarship Lab at UR and American Studies at Yale University, was awarded the American Studies Association's 2022 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities.
Park Published
Joonsuk Park, assistant professor of computer science, published the paper "Plug-and-Play Adaptation for Continuously-updated QA" in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Park Published
Joonsuk Park, assistant professor of computer science, published the paper "Masked Summarization to Generate Factually Inconsistent Summaries for Improved Factual Consistency Checking" in Findings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).
Park Published
Joonsuk Park, assistant professor of computer science, and former and current UR students Ting Chen, Daniel Verdi do Amarante, and Jenna Donaldson published the paper "Argument Mining for Review Helpfulness Prediction" the Proceedings of the Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
Gunkel Published
Dieter Gunkel, assistant professor of historical linguistics, published, “The First Person Singular of the Athematic Middle Optative in Vedic and Indo-Iranian” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society.
Gunkel Published
Dieter Gunkel, assistant professor of historical linguistics, was invited to two lectures this spring. At the University of Vienna he presented, “Evidence for and Against Stress Regulation in Tocharian Meter.” He presented, “Rigvedic *aśiya, *ī́śiya, *rāsiya and the Development of PIE *-ih1-h2e into Indo-Iranian” at Cornell University.
Lowder Published
Matthew Lowder, assistant professor of psychology, published the article "Relative Clause Effects at the Matrix Verb Depend on Type of Intervening Material" in Cognitive Science.
Kissling Published
Elizabeth Kissling, associate professor of Spanish and applied linguistics, published the article "Exploring Boundedness for Concept-Based Instruction of Aspect: Evidence from Novice L1 English Speakers Learning the Spanish Preterite and Imperfect" in The Modern Language Journal.
Kissling Published
Elizabeth Kissling, associate professor of Spanish and applied linguistics, published the article "From Rule-Based Explicit Instruction to Explicit Knowledge: A Pilot Study on How L1 English Speakers Interpret Pedagogical Rules about Spanish Preterite and Imperfect" in Instructed Second Language Acquisition.