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.

In the Spotlight

The 'For Want of WANT' Project (Alice Gaby)

This project explores how wants and desires are expressed cross-linguistically, with a particular focus on Australian Aboriginal languages.  Expressing one’s individual desires can be pragmatically risky, either because they are not shared by one’s interlocutor or because of their association with requests. It is therefore common for speakers to express this semantic category by means of constructions primarily associated with other semantic domains (cf. English want’s original meaning, ‘to lack’).  This project explores the range of strategies (pragmatic, morphosyntactic and multi-modal) speakers employ to express their desires synchronically, as well as the various diachronic sources and destinations of WANT expressions.  Graduate student Hannah Pritchett is currently contributing to the project by investigating the relationship between negation and WANT-coding in Australian languages.