About
the Linguistics Program at Brooklyn College:
To
meet some of our linguistics students or to find out about some of our program
activities, click on "Program Notes" in the left column.
Program
Description
The
Linguistics Program, which draws its faculty from several language related departments
at our beautiful campus in Brooklyn, New York, offers students training in understanding
and analyzing language and covers the full scope of the field of linguistics through
an interdisciplinary approach. We offer students a bachelor of arts degree with
a major and a minor in linguistics. In addition, students who choose to double-major
with linguistics as their second major may be able to apply up to three courses
from their first major towards the linguistics requirements. For further details
concerning these options, click on "Degree Requirements" in the left
column.
We
seek first to give our students a solid undergraduate grounding in contemporary
linguistics, beginning with an overall understanding of the nature and structure
of language, and then moving on to the core areas - phonology (the sounds of language),
morphology (the structure of words), syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences),
and semantics (the structure of meaning). We seek to give our students an appreciation
for language as a defining human characteristic, one that not only distinguishes
people from other creatures, but also binds people together in communities and
social networks. We offer courses which investigate how language is structured,
how it is acquired throughout childhood, how it functions in communication, how
it is processed in the human brain, how it can be processed by computers, how
it changes over time, and how it functions in society. The program also seeks
to strengthen students' awareness and understanding of the wide range of the field
of linguistics and the many key areas directly related to it, including but not
limited to, first and second language acquisition, cognitive science, the philosophy
of language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language
typology, the study of pidgins and creoles, and natural language processing. In
keeping with its location in the English Department, the Program also seeks to
foster an appreciation of the close relationship between language and literature,
including the many ways in which linguistics has informed the field of literary
criticism. The Program thus seeks not only to lay out the conceptual tools and
the information base in linguistics, but also to show how this knowledge has been
applied in these other disciplines.
Thus,
the program prepares our students for
graduate studies, and for a variety of careers, in fields such as:
- education
(e.g., teaching, curriculum development, assessment in language arts and second
language learning at all levels)
- translating and interpreting
- computational
fields related to language and speech technology
- international business
fields
- specific areas of legal practice (e.g., Immigration Law; International
Business)
- publishing: writing, editing, lexicography
- Foreign Service
and other internationally oriented government careers.
