Linguistics Major

As a linguistics major, you study languages not because you wish to speak them fluently, but because you wish to understand the nature of language in general. Linguists strive to uncover the hidden structure of human language and to explain how we humans can discuss any imaginable topic by combining a few dozen basic sounds. You will examine how words are built up from sounds, how sentences are built up from words, and how all this structure manages to communicate meaning.

sample courses:

Philosophy of Language

A survey of major philosophical problems concerning meaning, reference, and truth as they have been addressed within the analytic tradition. Readings that represent diverse positions on these focal issues will be selected from the work of leading philosophers in the field, for example: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Quine, Kripke, and Putnam. Students are encouraged to engage critically the ideas and arguments presented, and to develop and defend their own views on the core topics.

Phonetics

Phonetics is the study of the sounds of the world's languages. This course introduces articulatory and acoustic phonetics, with an emphasis on the production and perception of speech sounds. Students will learn to describe speech sounds in articulatory terms, transcribe them using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and produce them accurately. The course will also introduce the use of computers to display and analyze human speech. The course should be useful to students desiring a deeper understanding of one of the fundamental underpinnings of linguistics, but it also has practical applications in such fields as speech pathology, second language and accent acquisition, and speech synthesis and recognition.

our students have gone on to become:

Forensic Linguists

Language Teachers

Lawyers

Professors

Copywriters

Speech Pathologists

Scientists