Mark Yoffe Liberman is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

. He is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

, with a dual appointment as Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science. He is the founding director of the

Linguistic Data Consortium The Linguistic Data Consortium is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for linguistics research and develop ...

and Faculty Director of Ware College House.

Early life

Liberman is the son of psychologists

Alvin Liberman Alvin Meyer Liberman (; May 10, 1917 – January 13, 2000) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception. Biography Liberman rece ...

and Isabelle Liberman. Mark Liberman attended

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...

but did not graduate. After two years' service in the

US Army The United States Army (USA) is the primary land service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution.Article II, section 2, clause 1 of the United Stat ...

in Vietnam, he enrolled in graduate school in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

, from which he received a

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

(1972) and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

(1975).

Career

From 1975 to 1990, he was a Member of Technical Staff at

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...

Research

Liberman's main research interests lie in

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

, prosody, and other aspects of

speech communication Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, s ...

. His early research established the linguistic subfield of

metrical phonology Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the ...

. Much of his current research is conducted through

computational A computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that is well-defined. Common examples of computation are mathematical equation solving and the execution of computer algorithms. Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historic ...

analyses of linguistic

corpora Corpus (plural ''corpora'') is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of ...

. In 2017, Liberman was the recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Liberman is a founding co-

editor Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, a ...

of the ''

Annual Review of Linguistics The ''Annual Review of Linguistics'' is an annual peer-reviewed review journal published by Annual Reviews. It was established in 2015 and covers developments in the field of linguistics. The founding co-editors were Barbara Partee and Mark Y. Li ...

''. Liberman is also the founder of (and frequent contributor to)

Language Log ''Language Log'' is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the posts focus on language use in the media and in popular culture. Text available through Google Search fr ...

, a blog with a broad cast of dozens of professional linguists. The concept of the ''

eggcorn An eggcorn is the alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements,, sense 2 creating a new phrase which is plausible when used in the same context. Thus, an eggcorn is an unexpectedly fitti ...

'' was first proposed in one of his posts there.

Mobile phones and endangered languages

In 2012, Liberman and Steven Bird began a US$101,501 project "to use mobile telephones to collect larger amounts of data on undocumented

endangered languages An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead langua ...

than would ever be possible through usual fieldwork." The project resulted in the

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...

Aikuma.

Books

References

External links

*
Mark Liberman
at Ware College House, UPenn {{DEFAULTSORT:Liberman, Mark Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American phoneticians Harvard College alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni American bloggers Scientists at Bell Labs Annual Reviews (publisher) editors Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science faculty