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
Danish Verb Anaphora Project
The Danish Verb Phrase Anaphora project is a joint effort between Michael Houser, Line Mikkelsen, and Maziar Toosarvandani to understand two common, but understudied constructions involving anaphoric verb phrases in Danish: VP ellipsis (as in English Sarah read the paper and I will too) and VP pronominalization (similar, but not identical to, English Sarah read the paper and I will do so/it too). The project draws on corpus data as well as grammaticality judgments and these two data types are currently being integrated into a searchable electronic database. To learn more, go to the project page.