What
is Linguistics?
Linguistics is the study of one of
the most important human characteristics: language.
It is an interdisciplinary field that involves the integration of
the natural sciences,
the medical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
Studying linguistics is not a matter
of learning lots of different languages,
but rather it is the study of language in general. It is the
study of
the essential nature of any human language.
The questions that linguists ask are such
as the following:
- How do linguistic structures relate to the sounds
we utter, and how do these relate to the meaning that we
express?
- What is the structure of these sounds, and how
are they articulated?
- How can children master language as quickly as
they do, even though the number of sentences in a language
appears to be infinitely many?
- What does this remarkable capacity tell us about
the mind?
- How does human language differ from the communication
systems of animals?
- How does language change through time?
- By what process does a language diverse into
two mutually incomprehensible languages, as did Latin into
Rumanian and French and Proto-Arawak into Garifuna and modern
Arawak?
- How can the prehistory of a language be reconstructed?
The Linguistics Department is concerned with
these as with related, more practical questions:
- How can a language best be taught and learned?
- How can it best be translated?
- What is involved in the ability to read and write?
- How does one invent a practical orthography (alphabet
and spelling system) for a language?
- How does language relate to other facets of culture
and society?
- What sorts of problems develop when language
doesn't work as it should, such as in various language disorders?
- How do computer scientists use linguistic descriptions
for natural language understanding systems?
The department offers three undergraduate
majors:
- LINGUISTICS
- LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY
- LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION
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