Linguistics
Students and Faculty in the Department of Linguistics study language in all its forms: how it's used, how it's acquired, how it changes, and what it means. Our work lies at the intersection of cognition, culture, and computation, and our coursework and research experiences combine language with culture and society; action and cognition; and computation and learning.
We offer a major and a minor in Linguistics. These combine linguistic coursework with language courses. We also offer a minor in Interdisciplinary Cognitive Science and provide special emphasis courses for the Data Science major. As an interdisciplinary field, Linguistics combines well with majors or minors from a variety of other disciplines — from Romance Languages to Data Science, Psychology to Computer Science, and Sociology to Communication Disorders and Sciences, to name but a few.
Students can also earn a certificate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) as a starting point for careers in language teaching.
Faculty
B. Mokaya Bosire, associate teaching professor (Swahili). BA, 1991, MA, 1993, Nairobi; PhD, 2008, State University of New York, Albany. (2012)
Don Daniels, associate professor (languages of Papua New Guinea, language change and reconstruction, linguistic fieldwork, morphosyntax). BA, 2006, Dartmouth College; PhD, 2015, California, Santa Barbara. (2018)
Spike Gildea, professor (language description, diachronic syntax, typology, phonology, comparative linguistics, field methods and ethics, Cariban and other South American languages). BA, 1983, MA, 1989, PhD, 1992, Oregon. (2000)
Nika Jurov, assistant professor (computational psycholinguistics, cognitive science, speech, computational neuroscience). BA, 2008, MA, 2019, University of Paris; PhD, 2024, University of Maryland. (2025)
Vsevolod Kapatsinski, professor (psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, experimental morphology and phonology, language learning in the lab). BA, 2003, MA, 2005, New Mexico; PhD, 2009, Indiana. (2009)
Kristopher Kyle, associate professor (second language acquisition, language assessment, natural language processing, second language writing). BA, 2005, Harding; MA, 2011, Colorado State; PhD, 2016, Georgia State. (2019)
Gabriela Pérez Báez, associate professor (language documentation and description, language revitalization, semantic typology, language and cognition, Zapotec languages). BFA, 1997, MA, 2005, PhD 2009, State University of New York, Buffalo. (2018)
Melissa Redford, professor (phonetics, laboratory phonology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science). BA, 1992, California, Berkeley; MA, 1995, PhD, 1999, Texas, Austin. (2002)
Julie M. Sykes, professor (second language acquisition, interlanguage pragmatics, transformative pedagogy). BA, 2001, MA, 2005, Arizona State; PhD, 2008, Minnesota. (2016)
Guillem Belmar Viernes, assistant professor (language revitalization, language documentation and description, language rights, minority multilingualism, indigenous diaspora). BA, 2013, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; MA, 2017, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia; MA, 2019, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen; PhD, 2024, California, Santa Barbara. (2024)
Keli D. Yerian, teaching professor (language teacher education, curriculum development, gesture in discourse); director, Language Teaching Specialization MA Program. BA, 1991, North Carolina, Chapel Hill; MS, 1994, PhD, 2000, Georgetown. (2007)
Emeriti
Scott DeLancey, professor emeritus. BA, 1972, Cornell; PhD, 1980, Indiana. (1982)
T. Givón, professor emeritus. BSc, 1959, Jerusalem; MS, 1962, MA, 1966, PhD, 1969, California, Los Angeles. (1981)
Doris L. Payne, professor emerita (morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse; Amerindian and African languages). BS, 1974, Wheaton; MA, 1976, Texas, Arlington; PhD, 1985, California, Los Angeles. (1987)
Cynthia M. Vakareliyska, professor emerita. BA, 1973, Princeton; JD, 1976, Columbia; PhD, 1990, Harvard. (1994)
Participating
Gregory D. Anderson, linguistics
Dare A. Baldwin, psychology
Robert L. Davis, Romance languages
Robert Elliott, Northwest Indigenous Language Institute
Devin Grammon, Romance languages
Kaori Idemaru, East Asian languages and literatures
Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, East Asian languages and literatures
Mark Johnson, philosophy
Tyler Kendall, Linguistics
Nayoung Kwon, East Asian languages
Thomas E. Payne, Linguistics
Trish Pashby, Linguistics
Janne Underriner, Northwest Indigenous Language Institute
The date in parentheses at the end of each entry is the first year on the University of Oregon faculty.