Mark Liberman

Mark Yoffe Liberman /ˈlɪbərmən/ is an American linguist. He has a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is the founder and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium.

Liberman is the son of the psychologists Alvin Liberman and Isabelle Liberman, both of whom are now deceased.

Liberman attended Harvard College but did not graduate. After two years' service in the US Army in Vietnam, he enrolled in graduate school in linguistics at MIT where he received his MA and, in 1975, his PhD.

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

Liberman's main research interests lie in phonetics, prosody, and other aspects of speech communication. His early research established the linguistic subfield of metrical phonology. Much of his current research is conducted through computational analyses of linguistic corpora.

Liberman is also the founder of (and frequent contributor to) Language Log, a blog with a broad cast of dozens of professional linguists. The concept of the eggcorn was first proposed in one of his posts there.

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 than would ever be possible through usual fieldwork."

That resulted in a mobile app, Aikuma.

• Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum, Far from the Madding Gerund: and Other Dispatches from the Language Log. 2006, William, James, and Co. ISBN 1-59028-055-5.