Mark Liberman (pronounced /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 attended Harvard College but did not graduate. After two years' service in the U.S. Army in Vietnam,[1] he enrolled in graduate school in Linguistics at MIT where he received his MA and, in 1975, his PhD.[2] From 1975 until 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 research is frequently 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.
Liberman is the son of the psychologists Alvin Liberman and Isabelle Liberman, both of whom are now deceased.