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.
