Bachelors of Arts in Linguistics

Linguistics, the systematic study of human language, lies at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences. It is a theoretical discipline with ties to such areas as cognitive psychology, philosophy, logic, computer science, and anthropology. 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 colleagues in other departments span most of the major subfields of linguistics: phonetics and phonology, the study of speech sounds; morphology, the structure of words; syntax, the study of how words are combined; semantics, the study of meaning; historical linguistics, the study of language change in time; and computational linguistics, the modeling of natural language in all its aspects from a computational perspective. Students interested in learning more about linguistics and its relationship to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are encouraged to take LING 1101, a general overview, which is a prerequisite for most other courses in the field, or one of the first-year writing seminars offered in linguistics (on topics such as metaphor, language processing and disorders, English outside the box, and the language instinct). LING 1101 and our other introductory courses fulfill various Arts College distribution requirements. Most of our 1000- and 2000-level courses have no prerequisites. These cover various topics in linguistics (e.g., LING 1109 - English Words: Histories and Mysteries, LING 2221 - [Language and Society], LING 2223 - [Language and the Law], LING 2285 - Linguistic Theory and Poetic Structure) or focus on the linguistics of a particular geographic region or historical development of particular languages (e.g., LING 2241 - [Yiddish Linguistics], LING 2248 - [Native American Languages]). Talks and discussions about linguistics are organized by Cornell’s Undergraduate Linguistics Organization (the Underlings) and the Linguistics Colloquium (organized by the Cornell Linguistic Circle and the department). These meetings are open to the university public, and anyone wishing to learn more about linguistics is most welcome to attend. Information about such events is posted on the department website.