Mailing Address: 255 S. Central Campus Dr., Rm. 2300, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0492
Office Hours: 9am-5pm
Website: www.linguistics.utah.edu
Phone: 801-581-8047
E-mail: linguistics@utah.edu
Department Chair: Aaron Kaplan
Mission Statement
The aims of the Department of Linguistics are to provide the highest quality possible teaching for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Utah; to encourage and sustain excellent research in the discipline by faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates; and to provide appropriate professional service to the University and off-campus communities.
Overview
The Department of Linguistics offers close interaction with faculty. As linguists, we put language under the microscope in order to provide insight into various aspects of this uniquely human ability. We offer courses that examine language and languages from diverse angles including their sounds (phonetics and phonology), their ways of forming words (morphology), their sentence structures (syntax), their systems of expressing meaning (semantics), computational models of language, how languages are processed and acquired by children and adults (psycholinguistics), language variation in different social and cultural contexts (sociolinguistics), and how English can be most effectively taught to speakers of other languages. Consequently, linguistics is closely connected to many other fields, such as philosophy, psychology, biology, English, and computer science, and linguistics courses are a great way for majors in other departments to broaden their academic experience. We have two laboratories, the Speech Acquisition Lab and the Computational Linguistics Lab, plus other research and reading groups depending on student and faculty interests.
Graduates of our program have been admitted to some of the top graduate programs in linguistics and other fields (such as law) and found careers in ESL instruction, language analysis, and computational linguistics. Students in linguistics learn how to analyze languages and develop crucial skills for today's job market: reasoning, critical thinking, rigorous analysis, and written and verbal communication.
Types of Degrees
Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Science
Minor
Undergraduate Certificates
Master of Arts
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Certificate
Undergraduate Programs
The department offers a Linguistics Major (BA or BS) and Minor, and certificates in Computational Linguistics and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). The department offers a strong humanistic and scientific education in the nature of language. Students study the structural and more abstract properties of a variety of languages, including the sounds of languages and meaning. They also explore how languages can vary, how they are used in different contexts, and how they are processed and acquired. Students learn to apply the results of their studies to real-world issues, and they achieve a greater understanding of the human mind. The undergraduate Computational Linguistics certificate provides students interested in areas like machine translation, speech recognition, and natural language processing (NLP) with a solid understanding of both computational tools and fundamental linguistic theories and methodologies. This diverse, interdisciplinary skill set will prepare students for a variety of positions in the tech industry, or to pursue graduate work in Computational Linguistics. In the TESOL certificate courses, students take what they learn from language analysis and apply it to the domain of teaching and learning languages. With a strong theoretical and practical basis, students are prepared to be effective teachers.
Graduate Program
The Department of Linguistics offers an MA and a Ph.D. in Linguistics. Both degrees provide students with a broad foundation in the field of Linguistics via coursework and colloquia, and provide for specialist training in one or more subfields of Linguistics via opportunities to conduct individual and collaborative research. Our faculty specialize in theoretical syntax and semantics, phonology, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, second language phonology and computational linguistics.