Yale Linguistics Department

08/10/2026

The department will be holding a memorial for Stephen R. Anderson on Monday Oct 5, 2026. If you would like to receive further details, send a note, or contribute a story about Steve, please use the google form link that's in the first comment on this post. We'd love to see you in New Haven in person but there will be a zoom link (which you can receive by filling out the google form)

Stephen R. Anderson, Dorothy R. Diebold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, who taught at Yale from 1994 until his retirement in 2017, died October 13, 2025 in Asheville, North Carolina.

08/08/2026

A new study coauthored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern suggests that tens of thousands of languages were spoken between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago.

08/08/2026

Great language presentation in Brisbane by department alumni William Palmer and Leander He, and Djugun language specialist Jaala Ozies, who's been working with Claire Bowern on Djugun language reclamation. William and Leander have been working with Roro community members on a language project

04/04/2026

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01/13/2026

Yale Linguistics had a great showing at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans! We also had a reunion.
Presenters included current graduate students, faculty, alumni and collaborators:

Talks:

Lenition at left edges: interactions with phonological domains (Natalie Weber)
Cyclic Reduplication in O’odham: A Stratal OT Account of Double Reduplication (Jeremy Johns)
Pseudogapping Parameters (Yuyang Liu, co-authored with Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee)
Speech-based Generative AI for Low Resource Languages: Promises and Pitfalls (Claire Bowern, Alessio Tossolini)
Articulatory movement and coordination under prosodic modulation in English and Mandarin (Mike Stern, Jason Shaw)
Varieties of scalar exclusives (Ka-Fai Yip)
Objects and nothingness: Applicative-licensed nominal ellipsis (Yuyang Liu)
Concatenation occurs one morpheme at a time: Infixation in Choctaw (Dani Katenkamp, Finn Amber)
Does the Williams Cycle apply to Mandarin Chinese? (Ka-Fai Yip, co-authored with Fulang Chen)

Posters:

Tracing metonymic extensions of manner of motion verbs through diachrony (Teresa Borneo, Claire Bowern)
When is ‘or not’ required in an embedded polar question? (Richard Luo)
A Cognitive Bias for Individuation in Linguistic ‘mass’/‘count’ Uses Underlies Diachronic Trajectories of ‘Portioning’ and ‘Grinding’ Readings (Alessandra Pintado-Urbanc, Maria Piñango)
Where Indigenous language revitalization and dominant L2 instruction meet: converging on the Indigenous pedagogy (Jeremy Johns, Elena Koulidobrova)

01/13/2026

The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

12/21/2025

Yalies going to the LSA! We will be having a reunion/meetup on Friday morning, 8am, at the Canal St Pantry (cafe in the hotel). Hope to see you there!

11/23/2025

The NYT did a nice profile of Stephen Anderson:

In “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion,” he argued that language is a biological system unique to humans, despite the widespread belief that it extended to other animals.

11/18/2025

11/18/2025

Last Thursday, a select group of students in the Directed Independent Language Study (DILS) and Fields programs came together to share their accomplishments and discuss best practices for effective language acquisition when navigating Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs).