Welcome!

Welcome to the Berkeley Linguistics Department! With the first linguistics department to be established in North America (in 1901), Berkeley has a rich and distinguished tradition of rigorous linguistic documentation and theoretical innovation, making it an exciting and fulfilling place to carry out linguistic research. Its original mission, due to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the Sanskrit and Dravidian scholar Murray B. Emeneau, was the recording and describing of unwritten languages, especially American Indian languages spoken in California and elsewhere in the United States. The current Department of Linguistics continues this tradition, integrating careful, scholarly documentation with cutting-edge theoretical work in phonetics, phonology and morphology; in syntax and semantics; pragmatics; sociolinguistics and language revitalization; historical linguistics; typology; and cognitive linguistics. Berkeley PhDs tend to be interdisciplinary and creative, benefitting from interactions with distinguished faculty in such other Berkeley departments as anthropology, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and departments devoted to particular languages. The Department emphasizes research that seeks to discover and provide deep explanations for general properties of linguistic form, meaning, and usage.

Link to Undergraduate Student Learning Goals

In the Spotlight

Pronominal Coordination (Line Mikkelsen with undergraduates Jed Pizarro-Guevara and Milla Nizar)

As part of a larger investigation of the structure, meaning and use of near-synonymous expressions, this project examines coordination of pronouns (like `you and me') in contrast with plural pronouns (`us'). The goal is to determine the factors that govern the use of coordinated vs plural pronominals and relate these to properties of pronouns and coordination more generally. A large-scale corpus study demonstrates that pronominal coordination occurs disproportionately with expressions of exclusivity and distributivity, and also occurs disproportionately in environments reserved for plural noun phrases as well as in non-canonical syntactic positions, such as left-dislocated and right-dislocated positions. The next phase of the project involves an experimental investigation aimed at testing the semantic and pragmatic factors that cause this distribution.