Program Description
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 socio-discourse,
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.
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, John
Lawler has written on the use of computation in support of linguistic
research, and Acrisio Pires has interests in parsing and multilingual
applications.
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.
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. Patrice Speeter 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.
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
(Marilyn Shatz, Sam Epstein) and the relationships among language,
social and cognitive factors in aging (Deborah Keller-Cohen). The
language acquisition research engages multiple perspectives, including
the acquisition of syntactic knowledge (Epstein), lexical knowledge
(Shatz) and the relations between social, cognitive, and linguistic
development (Shatz). 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).
These overlapping subfields of linguistics examine language use and
language variation in social contexts. Both are concerned with
developing theoretical insights into the ways that situations,
identities and macro-level social, cultural, and political factors
relate to beliefs about language, to language use and to theories of
language. Discourse analysis focuses on the qualitative and
corpus-based analysis of spoken and written texts, with a particular
emphasis on narrative (Marlyse Baptista, Deborah Keller-Cohen, Carmel O'Shannessy, and Robin Queen). Sociolinguistics, which relies on both quantitative and qualitative analysis, covers a broad range of topics, including bi- and multilingualism, language contact, language variation and change, language attitudes, ideologies about language and language standardization (Robin Queen). Faculty working in these areas share interests in sociophonetics that overlap with colleagues in phonetics and historical linguistics. 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).
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. 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.
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