Lelia Glass
Director of Linguistics Program, Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Member Of:
- School of Modern Languages
Office Phone: (404) 894-7327
Office Location: Swann 331
Related Links:
Email Address: lelia.glass@modlangs.gatech.edu
Overview
Pronunciation of Name:
LEE-lee-uhPersonal Pronouns:
sheDr. Lelia Glass is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the School of Modern Languages. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2018, where she won the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, and held a dissertation fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council for Learned Societies.
Lelia works on lexical semantics (word meaning), compositional semantics (sentence meaning), pragmatics (inferences drawn in context), and sociolinguistics (how people use language in their social identity), from an empirically rich perspective, with a particular interest in how our knowledge of the (physical, social) world affects our interpretation of language.
Education:
- Ph.D. in Linguistics, Stanford University (2018)
- M.A. in Linguistics, Stanford University (2014)
- B.A. in Linguistics, University of Chicago (2012), with honors
Awards and
Distinctions:
Distinctions:
- Faculty Excellence in Research Award (Ivan Allen College, 2022)
- American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) / Mellon Dissertation Fellowship (2017-2018)
- Phi Beta Kappa of Northern California Graduate Student Scholarship (2018)
- Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching (Stanford University, 2017)
- Phi Beta Kappa (University of Chicago, 2012)
Interests
Teaching Interests:
In my teaching, I foster a welcoming socio-intellectual community and a growth mindset, encouraging humanities-confident students to learn technical tools and inviting computing-confident students to appreciate the social richness of language data.
I am also the founder and director of the Vertically Integrated Project team "Language and Identity in the New South." We have built an audio corpus of the speech of over 210 young adults who grew up in Georgia, from which we measure the position of the tongue in the mouth when producing vowels in order to quantify sociolinguistic variation in accents across individuals and over time. This project helps students develop skills in human subjects research, sociolinguistic theory, phonetic measurements, statistics, data science, and academic literacy.
I am also the founder and director of the Vertically Integrated Project team "Language and Identity in the New South." We have built an audio corpus of the speech of over 210 young adults who grew up in Georgia, from which we measure the position of the tongue in the mouth when producing vowels in order to quantify sociolinguistic variation in accents across individuals and over time. This project helps students develop skills in human subjects research, sociolinguistic theory, phonetic measurements, statistics, data science, and academic literacy.
Research Interests:
In my research, I use quantitative and computational tools to study lexical semantics (word meaning), compositional semantics (sentence meaning), pragmatics (inferences drawn in context), and sociolinguistics (how people use language in their social identity). These diverse projects are unified by their emphasis on corpus data and social context.
Research Fields:
- Linguistics
- Pedagogy and Curriculum Development
Issues:
- Digital Humanities
- Grammar
Courses
- LING-2100: Intro to Linguistics
- LING-3100: Apps of Linguistics
- LING-3813: Special Topics: Language and Computers
- LING-4015: Adv Lang Processing
- LING-4100: Language & Computers
- LING-4699: Undergraduate Research
- LING-4813: Special Topics: Language and Computers
- LING-6015: Adv Lang Processing
- LING-8803: Special Topics
- ML-8801: Special Topics
Publications
Recent Publications
Books
- Language and Computers
Date: August 2024
Journal Articles
- Attested versus unattested contrafactive belief verbs
In: Semantics and Pragmatics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: July 2025
- Social Meanings of the Low-Back-Merger Shift among Young Asian Americans in Georgia
In: American Speech [Peer Reviewed]
Date: March 2025
- Moderate versus extreme interpretations of political slogans
In: Journal of Pragmatics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: January 2025
Chapters
- Demographic change, migration, and the African American vowel system in Georgia
In: Movement, economy, orientation: Twentieth-century shifts in North American Language (edited by Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick, and Monica Nesbitt) [Peer Reviewed]
Date: December 2024
All Publications
Books
- Language and Computers
Date: August 2024
Journal Articles
- Attested versus unattested contrafactive belief verbs
In: Semantics and Pragmatics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: July 2025
- Social Meanings of the Low-Back-Merger Shift among Young Asian Americans in Georgia
In: American Speech [Peer Reviewed]
Date: March 2025
- Moderate versus extreme interpretations of political slogans
In: Journal of Pragmatics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: January 2025
- Testing the effect of political ideology on the Southern Vowel Shift among White Georgians
In: Journal of English Linguistics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: August 2024
- The red dress is cute: Why subjective adjectives are more often predicative
In: Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory [Peer Reviewed]
Date: August 2024
- Introducing Bed Word: A new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription
In: Linguistics Vanguard [Peer Reviewed]
Date: May 2024
- Using the Anna Karenina Principle to explain why CAUSE favors negative-sentiment complements
In: Semantics and Pragmatics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: October 2023
- Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English
In: Language Variation and Change [Peer Reviewed]
Date: July 2023
- Quantifying relational nouns in corpora
In: English Language & Linguistics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: October 2022
- The negatively biased Mandarin belief verb YIWEI
In: Studia Linguistica [Peer Reviewed]
Date: July 2022
- Decomposing and recomposing event structure
In: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: January 2022
- English verbs can omit their objects when they describe routines
In: English Language & Linguistics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: July 2021
- The lexical and formal semantics of distributivity
In: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: February 2021
- Adjectives relate individuals to states: Evidence from the two readings of English Determiner + Adjective
In: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: February 2019
- Systematicity in the Semantics of Noun Compounds: The Role of Artifacts vs. Natural Kinds (coauthored: by Beth Levin, Lelia Glass, and Dan Jurafsky)
In: Linguistics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: 2019
Chapters
- Demographic change, migration, and the African American vowel system in Georgia
In: Movement, economy, orientation: Twentieth-century shifts in North American Language (edited by Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick, and Monica Nesbitt) [Peer Reviewed]
Date: December 2024
Conferences
- Deriving the distributivity potential of adjectives via measurement theory
In: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (peer-reviewed abstract)
Date: March 2018
- Exploring the relation between argument structure and distributivity
In: Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (peer-reviewed abstract)
Date: September 2017
- Using lexical semantics to predict the distributivity potential of verb phrases in a large dataset
In: Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence [Peer Reviewed]
Thesis / Dissertations
- Distributivity, lexical semantics, and world knowledge
In: Stanford University dissertation
Date: June 2018
Updated: Dec 11th, 2025 at 1:40 PM