Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin

10/01/2026

Kyle Mahowald (UT Linguistics) and Daniel Drucker (UT Philosophy) wrote a very interesting article for The Atlantic on why AI models use expressives like "OH MY GOD" and "oops" in their chains of thought! Hint: it may not be just because they're imitating human speech. Here's a link to the article to find out more: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/why-do-ai-agents-sound-so-frustrated/688828/?gift=ARc54RAlvlof7-jtVW_rFyxCszKJjptG_1f7gNLddIs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share .

“ARGH ... WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”

09/25/2026

The Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin is hiring for one position whose work is on semantics and pragmatics at the rank of either tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor with tenure! See the following link for more details: https://apply.interfolio.com/194172 .

08/28/2026

Linguistics is excited to announce that Lydia Newkirk will be joining us this Fall 2026 and Spring 2027 as an Assistant Professor of Instruction!

She finished her Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 2022 and then spent time as a postdoc at Yale University. Most recently, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Lydia’s work is in semantics, especially from a typological perspective, with a focus on modal expressions, logophoricity, and degreelessness across various lesser studied languages.

She will be teaching undergraduate and graduate semantics courses this academic year.

Welcome to UT, Lydia!

07/08/2026

We are thrilled to celebrate our very own Jessy Li, as well as Milos Gligoric from UT’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for winning a Fall 2025 Amazon Research Award! Their grant is titled “Documenting and Recommending Tactics in HOL Light.” More information is available here: https://www.amazon.science/research-awards/latest-news/fall-2025-amazon-research-awards-recipients-announced. Congratulations, Jessy and Milos!

06/23/2026

Our students are going places! Elizabeth Wood (Ph.D., 2024) has been awarded the Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish government to work for three years at the Universidad del País Vasco. She will be working with Gorka Elordieta. Congratulations, Lizzy!

06/18/2026

We are excited to announce that Lindia Tjuatja will be joining us as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics. She is finishing her PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, and will start at UT in Fall 2027 as part of our computational linguistics faculty and UT’s broader NLP community.

Lindia is an alum of UT Linguistics and Electrical and Computer Engineering. While at UT, she was named one of the Dean’s Distinguished Graduates.

Welcome (back!) to UT, Lindia!

06/15/2026

Our department is hiring a faculty member at the rank of Assistant Professor of Instruction whose work is on semantics! See the following link for more details: https://apply.interfolio.com/187891 .

06/01/2026

We hope you are enjoying your summer! We want to highlight this course offered this upcoming Fall by Professor Kanishka Misra. Registration is ongoing, and seats are still available!

05/21/2026

We are thrilled that our very own Justin Power (Ph.D., 2020) has accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Haverford College! Since Justin's graduation he has remained at UT as as a data analyst supporting Language and Area Studies for the College of Liberal Arts, but he will be off to a cooler climate in Pennsylvania. Congratulations, Prof. Power!

04/21/2026

Two Linguistics students were honored in this year’s competition to select the Dean’s Distinguished Graduates of 2026. Gabriella Chronis, Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, was named one of the five Dean’s Distinguished Graduates for PhD students. And just earlier this month, she defended her dissertation "NLP as Language Ideology: Ways of Speaking of Speaking Machines"!

Meanwhile, an honorable mention went to Dantes Martinez for the undergraduate Dean's Distinguished Graduate award. Dantes is an undergraduate Linguistics and Anthropology double major who is just completing his honors thesis on the use of Belizean Kriol in the political speech of Belize.

Congratulations, Gabriella and Dantes, on your achievements at UT!