BA Arts

Linguistics is the study of human language, encompassing particular languages and properties common to all languages. Areas of interest include: phonetics and phonology, the study of the sounds and sound patternings in human languages; morphology, the study of the structure and formation of words; syntax, the study of the structure and patterning of words and phrases in sentences; semantics, the study of the nature of meaning; neurolinguistics, the study of how language is stored and processed in the brain; psycholinguistics, the study of how language is processed and acquired by young children; pragmatics, the principles which characterize language use in communication; sociolinguistics, the study of language in society; and computational linguistics, the computational modeling of linguistic knowledge, structure, and processing. Students majoring in second languages, English, education, pre-law, pre-medicine, and other social sciences also find linguistics course work valuable.