News

Corpus reveals our growing interest in education

9 September 2015

As children around the country go back to school, a new comparative study of spoken English reveals that we talk about education nearly twice as much as we did twenty years ago. The study, which compares spoken English today with recordings from the 1990s, allows researchers at Cambridge University Press and Lancaster...

Prof. Ianthi Tsimpli joins as Professor of English and Applied Linguistics

1 July 2015

The Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, looks forward to welcoming Professor Ianthi Maria Tsimpli from 1 July as the newly appointed Chair of English and Applied Linguistics. Professor Tsimpli has previously held the positions of Professor of Multilingualism and Cognition at the...

Linguistic fieldwork in Africa: A personal view

12 November 2014

“No, here you mean that you swept only the house and nothing else ,” Mark explains. Mark is one of the Luganda language consultants in Masaka that Dr Saudah Namyalo and myself are working with in our Alborada project. During three weeks fieldwork we describe and analyse particular syntactic aspects of this language, and...

Cambridge spin-out transforms voice recognition

3 July 2014

The following news item is from the Cambridge Enterprise website. New software developed by a University of Cambridge spin-out aims to transform voice recognition with technology that allows a more natural level of communication between people and their personal electronics. New software that interprets the spoken word is...

Vice-Chancellor speaks of "huge advantages" of bilingualism

11 June 2014

In an interview published in The Guardian , t he previous Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, spoke of his personal experience of growing up bilingual, and of the important benefits of bilingualism for individuals and for society. The Vice-Chancellor, whose parents arrived in...

Steep rise in recognition of Cambridge English exams

13 May 2014

A record number of organisations now use Cambridge English exams as proof of English language ability. Figures show that 15,000 organisations now recognise the tests, an increase of 36% since 2011. Organisations that rely on Cambridge English exams include companies, education institutions and immigration bodies. Recent...

Chancellor's visit

21 March 2014

The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, and the Vice Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, both paid a visit to the Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics on 20 March to learn more about cross-disciplinary research in language sciences at the University. The two-hour...

The missing structural pattern in human languages

10 February 2014

Linguists working at Cambridge and Newcastle have discovered that a certain combination of words is impossible in all languages, despite it being quite easy to understand what it would mean. Linguists have known for many years that, among the world’s languages, roughly half are like English in that they put the object of...

Mapping how Americans talk

11 December 2013

Research by Dr. Bert Vaux (Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) into regional variations in American English as part of the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey has been used as the basis for a short film called Soda Pop Coke. Please accept marketing cookies to show embedded content (open cookie preferences) View content (...

Mapping How Americans Talk

27 November 2013

A film based on a 2003 survey of U.S. dialects by Dr. Bert Vaux in the Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics has just been published. The film uses heat maps to show the distribution of regional variants in pronounciation and vocabulary (for example, the differnt ways to prounce the word 'pecan'; 'soda' versus 'pop...

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