The Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona is home to more than 15 unique linguistics labs that provide research opportunities, resources, and exciting discussions on topics like theoretical syntax, endangered languages, psycholinguistics, and more.
Directors: Andrew Carnie (carnie@arizona.edu), Heidi Harley (harley@arizona.edu)
No regular meetings
The department of linguistics at the University of Arizona sponsors an active and vibrant research team with a focus on theoretical approaches to Syntax and formal approaches to Semantics. This research group investigates all areas of sentence structure, morphosyntax, sentence meaning, and lexical meaning, as well as the interfaces of these with other related disciplines, such as sentence processing, language acquisition, computation. The focus of the group is in Generative (Minimalist) approaches to syntax and semantics, although other perspectives such as HPSG, LFG and Optimality theory are pursued. The research group encourages collaboration between participants and between faculty and students. The group holds frequent meetings (the Syntax Salon) both as a reading group and for the workshopping of new ideas.
Syntax Salon
The Syntax Center provides computing and resource materials for the study of topics in theoretical syntax. The center sponsors SynSalon, a regular meeting open to all, in which members may present work in progress, practice talks and presentations, or discuss a topic of current interest. Students are strongly encouraged to attend SynSalon. Current projects include: Verb Initial Syntax, telicity and argument structure. Uto-Aztecan and Indo-Iranian Syntax, passive, second-position clitics and complex predicates.
Research Projects
On-going research projects include (but are not limited to):
- Binding & Obviation in Minimalism
- Copular Constructions and Predication
- Topic & Focus, and syntactic structure
- Case & Ergativity
- Scrambling & Word Order
- Argument Structure, Aspect, Aktionsarten & Lexical semantics
- Extraction and Anaphora
- Complex Prediates
- The morphology syntax Interface
- Dative shift and morphophonology
- Syntactic theory and Sentence Processing
- Lexical Access
- The structure of DP.
- The acquisition of relative clauses
- Semantic Timing Effects
- Reconstruction
- Reference Types and Anaphora
- The syntax & semantics of particular languages:
- Modern Irish
- English
- Spanish
- Navajo
- Hiaki (Yaqui)
- Tohono O'odham
- Scottish Gaelic
- Japanese
- Chinese
- Russian
- Modern Persian
- Maori
- Mayan Languages
- Salishan Languages
Graduate Programs in Syntax and Semantics
The research group, in coordination with the department of linguistics, sponsors a Ph.D. in Linguistics with a specializations in Theoretical Syntax, Formal Semantics, Lexical Semantics, Syntax/Semantics Interfaces, Sentence Processing and related areas.
- A masters degree in the syntax of Native American languages is offered by the Linguistics dept.
- A master's degree in Spanish Linguistics (including syntax) is also available from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
Directors: Andrew Carnie (carnie@arizona.edu), Mike Hammond (hammond@arizona.edu) & Diane Ohala (ohalad@email.arizona.edu)
Meetings: 1 hour every 2 weeks on Fridays. Drop-in welcome but regular preferred.
The Celtic Linguistics Group is a research cluster of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates that studies the Syntax, Morphology, Phonetics and Phonology of the Modern Celtic Languages, with an emphasis on Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, Manx and Modern Irish. The Celtic Linguistics group has been the focus point for 5 major NSF research grants (see list below) and 2 smaller NSF conference and supplement grants. The group has explored a wide range of topics from experimental and instrumental measures of initial consonant mutation, to the syntax of pronoun post-posing, to corpus analysis of variation, to effective experimental methodologies in the field and to basic documentation and grammar writing. There have been a number of related and spin-off projects involving automatic speech recognition in Gaelic, language contact between Welsh and Spanish in Patagonia, and the structure of Welsh poetry.
Directors: Jennifer Roth-Gordon (jenrothg@arizona.edu), Qing Zhang (zhangq@arizona.edu)
Linguistics Anthropology is a dynamic research space providing faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates with state-of-the-art multimedia recording equipment, private experimental facilities, data storage, analytical software, and digitization capability. It serves as a venue for teaching, linguistics anthropology lab meetings, video recordings, and language-related research.
Director: Natasha Warner (nwarner@arizona.edu)
Meetings: present recently collected data for input, get feedback on new experiment designs, practice talks or get feedback on draft posters. This lab meets for 1.5 hours every 2 weeks. Meetings are semi-open (contact Natasha first), regular attendance preferred; drop-in to check it out is okay.
Director: Sandiway Fong (sandiway@arizona.edu)
The HLT lab provides research space. There are no regular meetings. Douglass 230 is the HLT Lab available for use by all HLT students. In addition, Douglass 301/309 is also available by permission of Sandiway Fong
Director: Diana Archangeli (dba@arizona.edu)
Monday and Wednesday 2-3:30, all welcome! Bi-weekly meetings include presentations, reading discussions, writing and editing sessions, all with the end goal of creating resources.
Indigenous Languages of the Americas and their Structures (ILAS) is a project dedicated to supporting community-centered language revitalization, reclamation and maintenance. The primary goal of the ILAS project is to produce a series of open-access resources for language workers, with a focus on Indigenous languages of the Americas. Resources will be edited by the Saguaro Group, a collaboration among colleagues, housed at the University of Arizona.
Indigenous Languages of the American and their Structures (ILAS)
Director: Tom Bever (tgb@arizona.edu)
Meetings: Discuss on-going research by students & faculty to be informed and to help: Topics range according to Individual interests: usual topics range across issues relating to cognition, universals, acquisition neurolinguistics, reading, L1/L2 consciousness, aesthetics.. you name it. Special current focus is on brain activity during perspective and retrospective processing of language. Meetings scheduled as needed, drop-in is okay.
Directors: Gus Hahn-Powell (hahnpowell@arizona.edu), Mihai Surdeanu, Clayton Morrison, Steven Bethard, Peter Jansen
Meetings: Friday 2-3:30pm, Gould Simpson 856. Open, drop-ins are welcome! In addition we encourage collaborations with Linguistics students. Some are even paid.
The Computational Language Understanding (CLU) Lab at University of Arizona is a team of faculty, students, and research programmers who work together to build systems that extract meaning from natural language texts, including question answering (answering natural language questions), information extraction (extracting specific relations and events), semantic role labeling (extracting semantic frames that model who did what to whom, when and where), parsing the discourse structure of complex texts, and other computational linguistics problems. These systems were used in several applications, ranging from extracting cancer signaling pathways from biomedical articles to automated systems for answering multiple-choice science-exam questions. The CLU lab includes members from the Computer Science department, the Linguistics department, and the School of Information. Access the reading link: https://list.arizona.edu/sympa/info/nlp-read
Director: Janet Nicol (nicol@arizona.edu)
Meetings are scheduled as needed in Comm 314. Discussions will have to do with the ongoing research on (1) learning words/phrases in a new language and/or (2) eye-movement tracking during language comprehension.
Directors: Adam Ussishkin (ussishki@arizona.edu) and Andy Wedel (wedel@arizona.edu)
All meetings are open unless otherwise noted. Drop-ins OK; regular participation is not expected. Please contact us to be added to the PsyCoL lab listserv. We meet to discuss lab members’ current research projects and as a reading group. Meeting topics include psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, statistics, typology, phonetics, phonology, morphology, and experimental methods.
Director: Michael Hammond (hammond@arizona.edu)
No regularly scheduled meetings. This lab studies psychophonology, phonology, and psycholinguistics.
There are a large number of small sign languages throughout Mayan-speaking region of Mesoamerica due to high rates of congenital deafness in various Maya communities (Le Guen 2019). Fox Tree 2009 documents how some of these sign languages, for example Meemul Tzij, used in the K'iche' Maya speaking area, incorporates pan-Maya gestures of arguably ancient origin (due to the fact that they are seen in Classic Maya inscriptions). The goal of this lab is to document these sign languages along with the co-speech gesture systems of spoken Mayan languages.
This lab is currently funded by a joint CNRS-UA grant with Jeremy Kuhn and Carlo Geraci (CNRS). We meet weekly online due to our bi-national structure.