What is Linguistics?

What is Linguistics? 

Linguistics, the systematic study of human language, lies at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences. 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; syntax, the study of how words are combined; semantics, the study of meaning; historical linguistics, the study of language change in time; computational linguistics, the modeling of natural language in all its aspects from a computational perspective. 

Studying linguistics is not a matter of studying many languages. Linguistics is a theoretical discipline with ties to such areas as cognitive psychology, philosophy, logic, computer science, and anthropology. Nonetheless, knowing particular languages (e.g., Spanish or Japanese) in some depth can enhance understanding of the general properties of human language. Not surprisingly then, many students of linguistics owe their initial interest to a period of exposure to a foreign language, and those who come to linguistics by some other route find their knowledge about languages enriched and are often stimulated to embark on further foreign language study.

What do linguists study and teach?

Linguistics attempts to answer such questions as

• how the mind enables us to produce and understand utterances
• how children acquire language
• how and why languages resemble and differ from each other
• how and why languages change over time, and how they are related
• how the categories of language relate to the world
• how language use varies across different social and cultural contexts
• how to make computers talk and 'understand' human languages

Getting started...

Students interested in learning more about linguistics and its relationship to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are encouraged to take Linguistics 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).  Linguistics 1101 and our other introductory courses fulfill various distribution requirements of the College of Arts and Sciences. Most of our 1100- and 2200-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 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 2217 - History of the English Language to 1300, LING 2218 - History of the English Language Since 1300, LING 2241 -Yiddish Linguistics).

Talks and discussions about linguistics are organized by Cornell's Undergraduate Linguistics Organization (the UnderLings) and the Linguistics Colloquium (organized by theCornell 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.