Lexical blending
Collaborative research on the multimodal dimensions of creative word formation and meaning.
Rice University
Suzanne
Kemmer
Associate Professor of Linguistics
and Cognitive Science
Exploring how meaning is shaped, shared, and transformed in language—across communities, histories, and minds.
Explore her workResearch focus
Cognitive Linguistics
Lexical Semantics
Language Change
Language & the Brain
Profile
Language as a window onto human cognition
Suzanne Kemmer is a specialist in cognitive linguistics whose work spans lexical semantics, linguistic typology and universals, morphology, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and the relationship between language and the brain.
Her fieldwork has included Kapampangan, Malagasy, Luo, Pulaar (Fula), and Azeri. She served as president of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association from 2001 to 2005 and has directed twelve doctoral theses in linguistics.
1988Ph.D. in Linguistics, Stanford University
1995—presentAssociate Professor, Rice University
12Doctoral theses directed
Current research
From lexical innovation to neural language processing
LLMs and the brain
Investigating neural language processing with large language models as scientific tools and comparative systems.
Language technology
Developing automatic phonetic segmentation for endangered and underrepresented languages with collaborators in computer science.
Selected work
Books, chapters, and collaborative corpora
The Middle Voice
A typological account of middle voice systems and the conceptual relationships that organize them.
Usage-Based Models of Language
Co-edited with Michael Barlow; nine studies connecting linguistic structure to language use.
Language, Culture, and Mind
Co-edited with Michel Achard; interdisciplinary work on language, cognition, culture, and context.
HONOR: Harvey Oral Narratives on Record
A curated corpus of interviews with Houston-area residents about Hurricane Harvey.
Contact
Rice University
Department of Linguistics
209 Herring Hall
Houston, Texas 77005