About

I am an Associate Professor at Brown University. I am trying to explain the ways languages, and in particular their phonological systems, change.

My research focuses on the way consonant and vowel weakening patterns evolve, on the characteristics of linguistic convergence, on the balance between different kinds of information rate (in particular speech rate vs. the rest), and on the universality of information as a characteristic of segments. My most recent project involved the curation of the XPF Corpus, a resource by which I can answer lots of questions that keep me up at night, but will hopefully let many other phonologists and phoneticians answer the questions that keep them up at night too.

If you have any questions, please contact me.

random comments regarding my name

• If you cite any of my papers, note that my surname is “Cohen Priva,” not “Priva.” I know that it does not follow the American hyphenation pattern, and I might yield in future publications, but it’s “Cohen Priva, Uriel” not “Uriel C. Priva”

• I pronounce my name /uʁ̞i'el/, but you can use your native liquid(s) if you drop the American English initial /j/. My name begins with an aleph (א), not a yod (י).

• The Hebrew spelling is אוריאל כהן פריווה, but the transliteration from Arabic is misleading. The original name had a /w/, not a /v/ (there are several Cohen-Freue around, but I am not sure how we’re related).

places to go

For linguistics and language at Brown, check out our seminar series, the linguistics concentration, and the linguistics graduate program.