Undergraduate Study
Linguistics, the systematic study of human language, lies at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences, and 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 linguistic colleagues in other departments span most of the major subfields of linguistics: phonetics and phonology, the study of speech sounds; syntax, the study of how words are combined; semantics, the study of meaning; historical linguistics, the study language change in time; sociolinguistics, the study of language's role in social and cultural interactions; and applied linguistics, which relates the results of linguistic research to problems of bilingual education, second-language learning, and teaching.
