School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-30 of 30 Results

  • Arto Anttila

    Arto Anttila

    Associate Professor of Linguistics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPhonology, morphology, language variation

  • Joan Bresnan

    Joan Bresnan

    Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Emerita

    BioAvailable at https://web.stanford.edu/~bresnan/

  • Anne Harper Charity Hudley

    Anne Harper Charity Hudley

    Associate Dean of Educational Affairs, Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education and, Professor, by courtesy, of Linguistics

    BioAnne H. Charity Hudley, Ph.D., is Associate Dean of Educational Affairs and Professor of Education at Stanford University and Professor of African-American Studies and Linguistics by courtesy. She is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the Symbolic Systems Program. Her research and publications address the relationship between language variation and educational practices and policies from preschool through graduate school. She has a particular emphasis on creating high-impact practices for underrepresented students in higher education. Charity Hudley is the co-author of four books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research; We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom, and Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, and Talking College, Making Space for Black Linguistic Practices in Higher Education.

    Her other publications have appeared in Language, The Journal of English Linguistics, Child Development, Language Variation, and Change, American Speech, Language and Linguistics Compass, Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations, and many book collections, including The Handbook of African-American Psychology, Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Literacy Education, Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, and Oxford Handbook of Language in Society. She has been an invited speaker for numerous keynotes and academic meetings, provides lectures and workshops for K-12 teachers, and generously contributes to community initiatives and public intellectual work.

    Dean Charity Hudley is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her contributions have been recognized with a Public Engagement Award from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, an award from the Linguistic Society of America, and funding from NIH, NSF, the Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Professor Charity Hudley has served on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America; the Standing Committee on Research of the National Council of Teachers of English; as a consultant to the National Research Council Committee on Language and Education; and to the NSF’s Committee on Broadening Participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Sciences. In addition, she has served as an Associate Editor for Language and on the editorial board of Language and Linguistics Compass and the Linguistic Society of America Committee on Linguistics in Higher Education.

    Dr. Charity Hudley was previously the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at U.C. Santa Barbara. At UC Santa Barbara, she also served as the Director of Undergraduate Research, Vice-Chair of the Council of Planning and Budget, and a Faculty Fellow for the Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning (CITRAL).

  • Eve Clark

    Eve Clark

    Richard Lyman Professor in the Humanities, Emerita

    BioI am interested in first language acquisition, the acquisition of meaning, acquisitional principles in word-formation compared across children and languages, and general semantic and pragmatic issues in the lexicon and in language use. I am currently working on the kinds of pragmatic information adults offer small children as they talk to them, and on children's ability to make use of this information as they make inferences about unfamiliar meanings and about the relations between familiar and unfamiliar words. I am interested in the inferences children make about where to 'place' unfamiliar words, how they identify the relevant semantic domains, and what they can learn about conventional ways to say things based on adult responses to child errors during acquisition. All of these 'activities' involve children and adults placing information in common ground as they interact. Another current interest of mine is the construction of verb paradigms: how do children go from using a single verb form to using forms that contrast in meaning -- on such dimensions as person, number, and tense? How do they learn to distinguish the meanings of homophones? To what extent do they make use of adult input to discern the underlying structure of the system? And how does conversation with more expert speakers (usually adults) foster the acquisition of a first language? I am particularly interested in the general role of practice along with feedback here.

  • Penelope Eckert

    Penelope Eckert

    Albert Ray Lang Professor, Emerita

    BioThe goal of my research is to understand the social meaning of linguistic variation. In order to do this, I pursue my sociolinguistic work in the context of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on the relation between variation, linguistic style, social identity and social practice.

    Gender has been the big misunderstood in studies of sociolinguistic variation - in spite of the fact that some of the most exciting intellectual developments over the past decades have been in theories of gender and sexuality ... so I have been spending a good deal of time working on language and gender as well.

    Since adolescents and preadolescents are the movers and shakers in linguistic change, I concentrate on this age group, and much of my research takes place in schools. The institutional research site has made me think a good deal about learning and education, but particularly about the construction of adolescence in American society.

  • Michael Frank

    Michael Frank

    Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology and Professor, by courtesy, of Linguistics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHow do we learn to communicate using language? I study children's language learning and how it interacts with their developing understanding of the social world. I use behavioral experiments, computational tools, and novel measurement methods like large-scale web-based studies, eye-tracking, and head-mounted cameras.

  • Laura Gwilliams

    Laura Gwilliams

    Assistant Professor of Psychology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics

    BioLaura Gwilliams is jointly appointed between Stanford Psychology, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science. Her work is focused on understanding the neural representations and operations that give rise to speech comprehension in the human brain. To do so, she brings together insight from neuroscience, linguistics and machine learning, and takes advantage of recording techniques that operate at distinct spatial scales (MEG, ECoG and Neuropixels).

  • Miyako Inoue

    Miyako Inoue

    Associate Professor of Anthropology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics

    BioMiyako Inoue teaches linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of Japan. She also has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Linguistics.

    Her first book, titled, Vicarious Language: the Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan (University of California Press), examines a phenomenon commonly called "women's language" in Japanese modern society, and offers a genealogy showing its critical linkage with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Professor Inoue is currently working on a book-length project on a social history of “verbatim” in Japanese. She traces the historical development of the Japanese shorthand technique used in the Diet for its proceedings since the late 19th century, and of the stenographic typewriter introduced to the Japanese court for the trial record after WWII. She is interested in learning what it means to be faithful to others by coping their speech, and how the politico-semiotic rationality of such stenographic modes of fidelity can be understood as a technology of a particular form of governance, namely, liberal governance. Publication that has come out of her current project includes, "Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth Century Japan." Language & Communication 31.3 (2011).

    Professor Inoue's research interest: linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, linguistic modernity, anthropology of writing, inscription devices, materialities of language, social organizations of documents (filing systems, index cards, copies, archives, paperwork), voice/sound/noise, soundscape, technologies of liberalism, gender, urban studies, Japan, East Asia.

  • William R. Leben

    William R. Leben

    Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent project:
    "Advertising and the Language of Persuasion," a book for Oxford University Press based on my spring 2016-17 and 2019-20 Stanford courses

    In press:
    with Brett Kessler, the third edition of "English Vocabulary Elements," for Oxford University Press..

  • Christopher Manning

    Christopher Manning

    Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Machine Learning, Professor of Linguistics, of Computer Science and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for HAI

    BioChristopher Manning is the inaugural Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Machine Learning in the Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University, Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), and an Associate Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). His research goal is computers that can intelligently process, understand, and generate human languages. Manning was an early leader in applying Deep Learning to Natural Language Processing (NLP), with well-known research on the GloVe model of word vectors, attention, machine translation, question answering, self-supervised model pre-training, tree-recursive neural networks, machine reasoning, dependency parsing, sentiment analysis, and summarization. He also focuses on computational linguistic approaches to parsing, natural language inference and multilingual language processing, including being a principal developer of Stanford Dependencies and Universal Dependencies. Manning has coauthored leading textbooks on statistical approaches to NLP (Manning and Schütze 1999) and information retrieval (Manning, Raghavan, and Schütze, 2008), as well as linguistic monographs on ergativity and complex predicates. His online CS224N Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning videos have been watched by hundreds of thousands of people. He is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and an ACL Fellow, and a Past President of the ACL (2015). His research has won ACL, Coling, EMNLP, and CHI Best Paper Awards, and an ACL Test of Time Award. He has a B.A. (Hons) from The Australian National University and a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1994, and an Honorary Doctorate from U. Amsterdam in 2023, and he held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Sydney before returning to Stanford. He is the founder of the Stanford NLP group (@stanfordnlp) and manages development of the Stanford CoreNLP and Stanza software.

  • Yoshiko Matsumoto

    Yoshiko Matsumoto

    Yamato Ichihashi Chair of Japanese History and Civilization and Professor, by courtesy, of Linguistics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsBased on in-depth analyses of Japanese with a cross-linguistic perspective, my research emphasizes the importance of linguistic and extralinguistic context in understanding the structure, meaning and use of language. I have worked on the pragmatics of linguistic constructions (e.g. frame semantics of noun-modifying construction, reference, honorifics, discourse markers) and sociocultural aspects of discourse (e.g. politeness theories, speech acts, bilingualism, intersection of language, gender and age, ideology, and identity reflected in Japanese as a second language). Topics of my current research center around conversational narratives especially of older adults and disaster survivors – (re)framing of narratives, ordinariness, stances taken by participants, integration of pragmatic factors in Construction Grammar, and typology and functions of noun-modifying constructions.

  • Jay McClelland

    Jay McClelland

    Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of Psychology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics and of Computer Science

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research addresses topics in perception and decision making; learning and memory; language and reading; semantic cognition; and cognitive development. I view cognition as emerging from distributed processing activity of neural populations, with learning occurring through the adaptation of connections among neurons. A new focus of research in the laboratory is mathematical cognition and reasoning in humans and contemporary AI systems based on neural networks.

  • Robert Podesva

    Robert Podesva

    Associate Professor of Linguistics
    On Leave from 10/01/2023 To 03/31/2024

    BioI am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. I hold degrees from Stanford University (PhD, MA) and Cornell University (BA) have been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. My research examines the social significance of variation in the domains of segmental phonetics, prosody, and voice quality. I have a particular interest in how phonetic resources participate in the construction of identity, most notably gender, sexuality, race, and their intersections. My latest projects focus on the social meaning of non-modal voice qualities in interactional contexts and sociolinguistic variation in inland California and Washington, DC. I have co-edited Research Methods in Linguistics (with Devyani Sharma), Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice (with Kathryn Cambpell-Kibler, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew Wong), and a special issue of American Speech on sociophonetics and sexuality (with Penelope Eckert). I live in San Francisco.

  • John Rickford

    John Rickford

    J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.

    A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).

    My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected.

  • Jonathan Rosa

    Jonathan Rosa

    Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop insights into ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first offers frameworks for understanding ethnoracial contradictions across distinctive societal contexts by interweaving ethnographic analysis of diasporic Puerto Rican experiences and broader constructions of Latinidad that illustrate race and ethnicity as colonial and communicative predicaments. The second spotlights decolonial approaches to the creation of collective well-being through educational and societal transformations based on longstanding community collaborations in Chicago.

  • Meghan Sumner

    Meghan Sumner

    Associate Professor of Linguistics
    On Leave from 10/01/2023 To 06/30/2024

    BioI am an Associate Professor of Phonetics at Stanford. My work simplified: I take sound patterns that exist in languages and associated variation and usage patterns (who says what, how and when), and investigate the social meaning humans associate with these patterns (and how they come to make these associations). I care about how, cognitively, this social information affects attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension. Then, I take all of that, and investigate the areas in which language and society interact and highlight how this advances theory, but also how stereotype and bias are reinforced through spoken language. Much of what we currently know about speech variation, language and cognition stems from experiments that probe one component of this process at time, leave out social factors and experience, use stimuli from normative white talkers, and are quite distant from the interdisciplinary and diverse research needed to advance theories and address issues relevant to society. My general focus is on understanding the mechanisms and representations that underlie spoken language understanding and how they interact across various listener and speaker populations in a social and dynamic world.

  • Chao Sun

    Chao Sun

    Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and, by courtesy, of Linguistics
    On Leave from 09/01/2023 To 08/31/2024

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy primary research interest is in Chinese linguistics studying how linguistic forms and meanings vary systematically in different socio-cultural contexts in modern Chinese languages. My other works concern with morphosyntactic changes in the history of Chinese and pedagogical grammar in teaching Chinese as Second Language.