Linguistics (BA)

About this programme

Linguistics, the systematic study of human language, lies at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences. It is a theoretical discipline with ties to such areas as cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, logic, computer science, and anthropology. Much of its appeal derives from the special combination of intuition and rigor that the analysis of language demands. The interests of the members of the Department of Linguistics and colleagues in other departments span most of the major subfields of linguistics: phonetics and phonology, the study of speech sounds; morphology, the structure of words; syntax, the study of how words are combined; semantics, the study of meaning; historical linguistics, the study of language change over time. Linguistic methodology includes long standing approaches, as well as computational linguistics (the modeling of natural language in all its aspects from a computational perspective) and experimental linguistics (using empirical methods—such as behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, or corpus analysis—to test hypotheses about how language is produced, processed, and understood).