Degrees Offered
The Department offers a graduate degree program leading to the Ph.D. in Linguistics, and participates in joint Ph.D. program in Linguistics and Romance Languages. Student-initiated combined degree programs (e.g., Linguistics and Anthropology; Linguistics and Psychology) are possible as well. The University of Michigan also provides students with diverse opportunities to acquire expertise in other areas that complement their linguistics coursework and research (e.g., a certificate in Women's Studies).
Fields of Study
The graduate program focuses on linguistics as a cognitive and social science. We offer strong theoretical grounding in phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as the opportunity to investigate the intersection of these subfields with language contact, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. Students are encouraged to formulate and test theories of speakers' linguistic knowledge, and theories of linguistic variation and use, drawing on observational, experimental, and computational methods.
The program at Michigan takes a strongly interdisciplinary approach. Thus, in addition to the six research areas described below, the research agendas of many faculty and students bridge these areas (as is apparent from descriptions of faculty research interests and recent Ph.D. theses). In keeping with our long-standing interdisciplinary focus, close ties are maintained with the Departments of Anthropology, Computer Science, Philosophy, and Psychology, as well as the language departments and the English Language Institute. Many Department faculty also specialize in particular languages or language areas, including Chinese, Germanic, Indo-Aryan, Romance, and Salishan languages, and languages of North West and sub-Saharan Africa. Several faculty members are also experienced fieldworkers, offering expertise in a variety of field methodologies and in the preparation of descriptive grammars and dictionaries.
Computational Linguistics
Steven Abney specializes in computational linguistics, particularly parsing and language learning. Drago Radev (School of Information and Linguistics) specializes in computational linguistics in information systems, especially summarization and question answering. Richmond Thomason (Philosophy and Linguistics) has interests in natural language generation and dialogue systems. Richard Lewis (Psychology and Linguistics) studies computational models of human sentence processing. In addition, Acrisio Pires has interests in parsing and multilingual applications.
Historical Linguistics
Among the common themes in faculty members' historical linguistic interests are sound change, methods and practice in establishing language families, and language contact. Jeffrey Heath's important historical research has focused on languages of Arnhem Land in Australia, dialects of Moroccan Arabic, and Songhay languages. Sally Thomason specializes in changes resulting from language contact; she also studies deliberate linguistic changes and (mainly from a skeptical viewpoint) proposals for long-distance relationships. Bill Baxter specializes in Chinese historical linguistics; he also has strong interests in questions of distant linguistic relationships. Pam Beddor, primarily a phonetician, investigates phonetic routes to sound change. Steve Dworkin is a historical Romance linguist, with a special emphasis on processes of lexical change. Ben Fortson specializes in Indo-European linguistics. Acrisio Pires is primarily a theoretical syntactician, but he also investigates syntactic change. Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, focuses on interactions among language contact, language ideology, and language change. The historical linguistics group in the Department is augmented and strengthened by research on language history being carried out by other faculty in this and other departments at the university, as well as by faculty in neighboring universities.
Phonetics and Phonology
The research interests of the phonetics and phonology faculty converge in relating phonological structures to phonetic reality, and the experimental testing of phonological analysis. San Duanmu specializes in phonological theory, with particular interest in language universals and providing a unified account of seemingly diverse phonological phenomena. Pam Beddor specializes in phonetic theory, especially speech perception, and the role of perception in phonological patterns. Andries Coetzee, a theoretical phonologist, explores the empirical consequences of the formal properties of an Optimality Theoretic grammar. All three faculty also have special interests in phonetic and phonological variation, which are shared by intonation specialist Robin Queen. The department's historical linguists provide further phonological expertise to the Department's curriculum.
Psychology of Language
Research in this domain falls into two primary areas: adult sentence comprehension and language across the lifespan. The research on comprehension (Julie Boland, Richard Lewis) focuses primarily on syntactic analysis and its relationship to lexical and semantic processes. These cognitive processes are studied using both experimental techniques (e.g., eye-tracking, reaction time paradigms) and computational modeling. Research in the psychology of language across the lifespan investigates language acquisition in children (Sam Epstein) and the relationships among language, social and cognitive factors in aging (Deborah Keller-Cohen). The language acquisition research focuses on the acquisition of syntactic knowledge (Epstein). Faculty from other departments with related interests include Nick Ellis, Susan Gelman, Catherine Lord, Fred Morrison, Thad Polk, and Twila Tardif (all from Psychology), and Diane Larsen-Freeman (the English Language Institute).
Sociolinguistics, Language Contact and Discourse Analysis
These overlapping subfields of linguistics examine language variation and language use, with a concern for developing theoretical insights into the ways that situations, identities and macro-level social, cultural, and political factors relate to beliefs about language, to language structure and use and to theories of language. Sociolinguistics, which relies on both quantitative and qualitative analysis, covers a broad range of topics, including bi- and multilingualism, language variation and change, language attitudes, ideologies about language and language standardization (Carmel O'Shannessey, Robin Queen). Language Contact covers multilingualism, language change, pidgins and creoles and the effect that contact among people has on linguistic structure and language use (Marlyse Baptista, Carmel O'Shannessy, Robin Queen, Sarah Thomason). Discourse analysis focuses on the qualitative and corpus-based analysis of spoken and written texts (Deborah Keller-Cohen). Faculty working in these areas share interests in sociophonetics that overlap with colleagues in phonetics and historical linguistics and in syntax that overlap with colleagues in theoretical syntax and semantics. Faculty from other departments with related interests include Bruce Mannheim, Judith Irvine, Webb Keane, Barbara Meek, and Alaina Lemon (Anthropology), Anne Curzan (English), Renee Anspach (Sociology), and Lesley Rex and Jay Lemke (Education).
Syntax and Semantics
Acrisio Pires and Sam Epstein share an interest in developing explanatory, restrictive theories of human syntactic and semantic knowledge. (Daniel Seely, a faculty member from Eastern Michigan University, also shares this focus and works closely with the faculty and students interested in this area of research.) Each works within a Chomskyan framework, with particular attention to the exploration of the Minimalist Program. Pires is particularly interested in explaining Agreement and Control Phenomena and Epstein continues to develop the so-called "Derivational Approach" to syntactic relations. Ezra Keshet conducts research in the area of semantics. Each faculty member has a strong interdisciplinary outlook, as do Rick Lewis and Julie Boland, who investigate psycholinguistic theories of syntactic, semantic and lexical information flow during sentence processing.
