Harvard Linguistics

08/31/2026

Wishing a warm welcome to four new members of the department this fall: incoming first-year graduate students Ömer Tabak and Neng Wan, and lecturers Sreekar Raghotham and Zachary Rothstein-Dowden!

08/23/2026

Recently Aljoša Milenković defended his thesis, "Metrical grammar: Variation, gradience, and cumulativity at the syntax-phonology interface" - supervised by Kevin Ryan with committee members Jeremy Rau and Aleksei Nazarov. Congratulations Dr. Milenković!

08/13/2026

On Tuesday, Jack Rabinovitch successfully defended his thesis, "The Speech Report: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation into the Compositional Semantics of Reported Speech." Congratulations Dr. Rabinovitch!

(Pictured with committee members Kathryn Davidson, Tanya Bondarenko, and Travis Major)

07/02/2026

The PhonLab was well-represented at the 20th anniversary Laboratory Phonology conference in Montréal! Among the presentations were the following:

Alice Wang, Robert Xu, and Katie Franich -"The Production of Contrastive Focus in Code-switching"

Jordan Mitchell, Alice Wang, Tong Shu, Annie Raschella, Aaron Arlanza, and Katie Franich - "Language Transfer in Co-Speech Gestures: Evidence from Bilingual Code-Switching"

Vincent Nwosu and Katie Franich - "Cross-dialectal incomplete neutralization in Igbo implosives"

Katie Franich, Connor Mayer, Travis Major, and Gulnar E. Yulghun - "Co-speech gestures and prominence in Uyghur"

Katie Franich - "Co-speech gesture as evidence for prosodic planning and as a resource for fieldworkers"

06/19/2026

A group of Harvard linguists met up at the Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference at the University of Pennsylvania!

Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers, Harvard Linguistics PhD)
Shannon Bryant (Rutgers, Harvard Linguistics PhD)
Kathryn Davidson (Harvard Linguistics faculty)
Victor Gomes (Harvard Psychology post-doc)
Maggie Kandel (UPenn, Harvard Psychology PhD)
Mikaela Belle Martin (UPenn, Harvard Linguistics BA)
Danielle Novak (Johns Hopkins, Harvard Ling BA)
Jacopo Romoli (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Harvard Linguistics PhD)
Yagmur Sag (Swarthmore, former Harvard Linguistics faculty)
Ankana Saha (Harvard Linguistics PhD)
Greg Scontras (UC Irvine, Harvard Linguistics PhD)
Hanna Shine (Harvard Psychology)
Natasha Thalluri (Harvard Linguistics)
Briony Waite (Harvard Psychology)
Yiqian Wang (Harvard Linguistics)

📸: Helena Aparicio

06/16/2026

Announcing a new semantics journal: Semantics of Natural Language (SNL)!

SNL is a new diamond open access journal dedicated to the study of meaning in natural languages — and the scholar-owned, scholar-led intellectual successor to Natural Language Semantics (NLS). SNL is published with Open Library of Humanities under the auspices of LingOA.

To find out more, read the first round of pre-print articles, or submit, visit snl-journal.org

Before submitting, you should read over the 'Author Guidelines' and checklist below, ensuring that your submission also adheres to the 'Focus and Scope' of the journal, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account).

06/04/2026

Congratulations to our new Ph.D. recipients Daria Bikina, Ankana Saha and Hande Sevgi!

05/13/2026

ASL in The Crimson

The Crimson published a fantastic article about our ASL program! Check it out here:

I am two months into Harvard’s ASL 1 course, and I’ve finally racked up enough signs and confidence to clumsily string together a few complete sentences at our morning ASL coffee chat.

05/07/2026

Senior Thesis Colloquium 2026

Many congratulations to all of our senior thesis writers who presented their work on May 1! Writing a thesis is a major achievement, and we are so proud of the hard work, creativity, and intellectual curiosity that went into these projects.

This year's senior thesis writers include:
Sam Lyczkowski — Al-Af‘āl Al-Rubā‘īyah: The Rise of Quadriradical Verbs in Arabic
Annie Raschella — Acoustic and Affective Correlates of L2 Development: Prosodic, Psychological, and Physiological Variation in L2 Spanish
Simon Ma — JKL: Japanese and Korean demonstratives in humans and LLMs

Well done, everyone!

(Photo credit: Anabelle Caso)

05/04/2026

Spring Reception 2026

The Department of Linguistics held its Spring Reception on Friday, May 1. Faculty, graduate students, undergraduate concentrators, and visitors gathered for a lunch filled with conversation and celebration. A special highlight was a speech by our Interim Chair, Gennaro Chierchia, delivered in the role for the final time!

Many thanks to everyone who joined us! Have a lovely summer!

(Photo credit: Kate Pilson)