Nate Severance '12 recently received a National Science Foundation grant for his PhD research on languages of Burkina Faso....

Reed Hall, Room 108, 4:15 pm. Claire Bowern, Yale University. This event is free and open to the public.

Thursday, 3/3/2016 at 4:00 pm, Reed Hall, Room 104, Lecturer: David W. Anthony, Hartwick College, This event is free and open to the public!

An Interactional Approach to Language Documentation: the Case of Place Reference in Kula, Nicholas J. Williams ‘08, University of Colorado, Reed 104, 4:00 pm, Thursday, October 8, 2015...

Two Dartmouth Linguistics students presented their research at the 2016 Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Conference April 9-10.

Lecture by Mary Hermes, University of Minnesota Monday, January 26, 2015, Reed 104, 4:00 pm please note time change Reception to folllow

Nine Dartmouth students, alums, and professors presented research in Chicago at New Ways of Analyzing Variation-43, October 23-26, 2014.

Exceptions to the Saussurian principle of arbitrariness are relatively limited in language, and several semantic domains have been identified in the scholarly literature as the primary loci of phonetic iconicity. One type of symbolism that has sparked debate regarding the nature of sound symbolism is the association of "smallness" and "nearness" meanings with high acoustic frequency sounds (and, conversely, the association of "largeness" and "distance" meanings with lower frequency sounds). Though this pattern of sound-meaning mappings has been reported in diverse languages worldwide, the universality of a link between acoustic frequencies and magnitudes has stirred some debate. This study looks at data from 120 Australian languages to investigate the occurrence of magnitude-related sound symbolism in these languages, which have been underrepresented in earlier cross-linguistic studies of sound symbolism. Comparisons of phoneme frequencies across size, distance, and basic vocabulary sets provides information about symbolism in these languages and the types of sounds through which it is expressed. By comparing the patterns found across language families/subgroups and geographic areas, these findings are also able to provide evidence about how magnitude sound symbolism arises more generally....

Congratulations to the Class of 2014!