Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin

Two Linguistics students were honored in this year’s competition to select the Dean’s Distinguished Graduates of 2026. Gabriella Chronis, Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, was named one of the five Dean’s Distinguished Graduates for PhD students. And just earlier this month, she defended her dissertation "NLP as Language Ideology: Ways of Speaking of Speaking Machines"!

Meanwhile, an honorable mention went to Dantes Martinez for the undergraduate Dean's Distinguished Graduate award. Dantes is an undergraduate Linguistics and Anthropology double major who is just completing his honors thesis on the use of Belizean Kriol in the political speech of Belize.

Congratulations, Gabriella and Dantes, on your achievements at UT!

Congratulations to our newest Ph.D. in Linguistics, the now-Doctor Gabriella Chronis! Gabriella defended her dissertation, "NLP as Language Ideology: Ways of Speaking of Speaking Machines," last Wednesday, April 8. Her dissertation advisor are Prof. David Beaver and Prof. Katrin Erik.

Many congratulations to Hongli Zhan for successfully defending his dissertation entitled "Towards Emotionally-Intelligent AI Systems" on Thursday, April 2! His dissertation advisor is Prof. Jessy Li.

Congratulations to our doctoral student, Masha Cheremisinova, on the publication of A Grammar on Beserman! She is one of the authors of this grammar, along with Dr. Timofey Arkhangelskiy from University of Hamburg and Dr. Maria Usachea, who is an independent researcher.

This important work draws on many years of fieldwork within the Beserman community. It was only in 2021 that Beserman was officially recognized as a separate language. Since completing this grammar, Masha has moved on to document Yagua, an Indigenous language of Peru. Please see the post for more information on her Beserman grammar.

LINGUIST List 37.1298 Books: A Grammar of Beserman (2 vols): Arkhangelskiy, Usacheva and Cheremisinova (2026) The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

Congratulations to our postdoctoral fellow, Wesley dos Santos, for winning the 2026 DELAMAN Award! Wesley wins this award for his archived collection of documentary materials entitled "Kawahiva: documentation of vocabulary, grammar, texts, and verbal arts / Kawahiva: documentação do vocabulário, gramática, textos, e artes verbais," which is archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR). This collection in the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) covers three of the eight varieties of Kawahíva—Juma (ISO 639-3 jua), Parintintin (pah), and Jupaú (urz)—which are spoken in northwest Brazil. You can read more about the announcement at https://www.delaman.org/news/2026-delaman-award-goes-to-wesley-dos-santos/

Earlier this month on February 6th, several members of the UT Linguistics community, including Dr. Corrine Occhino, Dr. David Quinto-Pozos, Manuel Quinto-Pozos, Cem Barutçu, and Ethan Hartzell, attended the Texas School for the Deaf Foundation's 2026 Diamond Gala.

This annual TSDF event raises funds to support deaf education across Texas, helping bridge the gap between legislative funding and the resources needed to provide high-quality education for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. This year’s gala highlighted the impact of those efforts, including statewide outreach programs serving families in 87 counties and support for the 550 students who attend TSD.

It was especially meaningful to see TSD’s Culinary Arts and Hospitality students leading the evening’s dining experience under professional mentorship — a powerful example of Deaf education in action!

Please join us in congratulating Kyle Mahowald on his promotion to Associate Professor, effective August 16th, 2026! Through his research and teaching, Kyle has made enormous contributions to our department, the university, and the field. Congratulations, Kyle!

Dr. Kyle Mahowald was a guest on NPR's Brainwaves podcast along with Dr. Melanie Mitchell from the Santa Fe Institute on an episode about AI and thought! Link to the episode:

Brainwaves: Is AI actually thinking? The rate at which artificial intelligence is able to replicate human behavior has increased in recent years. Does that mean it's thinking like us? In the third episode of "Brainwaves," what artificial intelligence teaches us about our own capacity for thought.

We are thrilled to celebrate our very own Danny Law, Justin M. Power, and David Quinto-Pozos for winning the 2026 Best Paper in Language Award, for their paper "Bringing signed languages into the study of regular sound change." In this paper they argue that taking sign languages into account will refine and expand our understanding of the processes that govern sound change. This paper was published as a Perspectives piece, alongside responses from esteemed colleagues in the field. You can read the paper and the discussion here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55601. Congratulations, Danny, Justin, and David!

LSA is excited to announce the winners of the Best Paper in Language Award! Congratulations to Danny Law, Justin M. Power, and David Quinto-Pozos, the authors of this year's award-winning article, “Bringing signed languages into the study of regular sound change.”

This award, made for the first time in 2012, is given for the best paper published in the journal Language in any given year. Join us in celebrating this achievement at ! View the article - https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/24/article/969623

Please join us in congratulating our colleague John Beavers on being honored as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). John Beavers is the Chair of the Department of Linguistics and the Robert D. King Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts at UT, and is just completing a term as Editor of Language, the flagship journal of the LSA. This well-deserved honor recognizes his contributions to linguistics and to the LSA.

We would like to finally introduce you to our third new faculty member, Kanishka Misra! Kanishka has joined us an Assistant Professor of Linguistics, and for the 2025-2026 academic year he is also a Harrington Faculty Fellow at UT. He is part of our computational linguistics research group and his interests stand at the intersection of cognitive science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on the statistical mechanisms that underlie the acquisition and generalization of complex linguistic phenomena and conceptual meaning. Welcome to UT, Kanishka!