Major Authors

Linguistics General Introduction Linguistics can be defined simply as the study of language. Any and all things dealing with language could be studied under the term linguistics, thus linguistics is inherently interdisciplinary. One of the main benefits of studying language is taking a long and detailed look at our remarkable ability to communicte with each other using language. How did language arise? How is human language different from animal communication? How do we store language in our brains? Why are there so many languages? Why and how do they change over time? Why do adults have such a difficult time learning a language while babies do it easily and without formal training? All these questions and many more are addressed by linguistic courses such as applied linguistics (which deals with the application of knowledge about language to the real-world problems of bilingual education, speech pathology, language acquisition, etc.), sociolinguistics (which looks at language in society), psycholinguistics (which deals with how people understand, learn and produce language), history of the English language (which looks at how our language has changed over time), modern grammar (which gives an in-depth look at English syntax and morphology) and introductory linguistics (which gives an overview of the building blocks of language, the sounds (phonology), shapes (morphology), organizations (syntax), and meanings (semantics)). Linguistics is usually considered a social science because it works through looking at language data (speech or writing) to form and test hypotheses about how language works. Linguistics tries to describe the patterns in our language which we use subconsciously. For example, how do we make nouns plural? The plural of ‘cat’ is ‘cats’ with an ‘s’ sound but the plural of ‘dog’ is ‘dogs’ with a ‘z’ sound and the plural of ‘box’ is ‘boxes’ with an ‘ez’ sound. What is the pattern? (What about the plurals of man or child or sheep?) And what does this pattern tell us about how language works? Linguistics is a place to start answering your questions about language. Why Take Linguistics as an English Major? Connections between literature and linguistics are deeply rooted but problematic. Language and literature seem to go together naturally, but the growth of more and more specialized areas of linguistics and literature have opened a gap between them. However, as interdisciplinary studies become more important in how universities seek knowledge, linguistics and literature may find common ground again. As literary studies increasingly cross disciplinary borders to look at literature in a cultural matrix, linguistics, with its connections to cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, biology, and even ecology, has more and more to offer students of literature. Of course, grammar courses have traditionally been part of English or language arts curricula because an in-depth focus on English sentence structure enhances understanding of the rhetorical choices literary authors make and those we make when we write ourselves. Likewise, history of the English language courses have traditionally been part of English curricula because they provide an arena for language, culture, and history to intersect. The study of language and literature cannot be separated from the study of the cultures that use that language to produce and question their identities. A history of the English language is the contextualizing framework for understanding how the literary and theoretical texts of the English major are connected. The history of the English language is the story not only of how English literature has risen to its current status but also the story of how and why we have come to study it. Because linguistics courses look at language from many different perspectives, from the mirco-level of sounds to the macro-level of meaning, they provide useful tools for analyzing literature (esp. historically remote literature), for honing writing skills, for contextualizing literary theory, and for engaging language and literature as producers of cultural identity.

Major Authors

Revised: May 21, 2003

Contact: Prof. Christine Roth or Cary Henson