Spanish, unlike English, does not have an established pronoun akin to singular ‘they’, that is to say, an already-existing pronoun with a long history of non-binary usage for either known or unknown referents. However, the greater visibility of non-binary people … Read more

Social Presuppositions Paul Portner, Georgetown University The presuppositions of a conversation are the propositions that the participants mutually (if tacitly) agree to treat as true for purposes of the conversation (Stalnaker, 1974).  Linguists usually think of presuppositions as being motivated by the … Read more

Prep for Prof. Portner’s Nov 3 Talk   Social Presuppositions Paul Portner, Georgetown University The presuppositions of a conversation are the propositions that the participants mutually (if tacitly) agree to treat as true for purposes of the conversation (Stalnaker, 1974).  Linguists usually … Read more

We will hear from Rich Stureborg who is currently a CS PhD student at Duke working on vaccine misinformation and high-subjectivity tasks in natural language processing.

We will hear from Elias Stengel-Eskin who is a new postdoc in the CS department (working with Mohit Bansal), focusing on how AI models represent meaning. Abstract: The mapping between language and meaning is not always clear. This is especially true of … Read more

March 3rd. 11am: Andij Rusyn on leveraging large language models (like Chat GPT3) in business applications and beyond Andriy is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill who majored in Computer Science and minored in Entrepreneurship and German (though he almost … Read more

Graduation Reception Every May, the Department of Linguistics holds a graduation reception and recognition ceremony. It’s a chance for us to congratulate and honor our graduates, and meet their friends and family. Specific information about each year’s reception will be … Read more

very spring, the Linguistics Graduate Student Association at UNC-Chapel Hill puts on its annual Spring Colloquium. We invite fellow linguists from all over to present and discuss current topics of interest in the field in an all-day conference. The Colloquium … Read more