Linguistics Academic Programs

     Language is a human system. Just as a biologist studies any form of life, and an astronomer any celestial body, so a linguist seeks understanding of any aspect of language.

     The UNT Linguistics program is for people who seek explanations for language as a fundamental human cognitive endowment. In this program you will have an opportunity to investigate how languages are structured, used, exhibit variation, and change over time.

Phonetics - The study of how sounds in human language are produced and perceived.

Phonology – The study of how sounds of human language are organized and combined to form meaningful units.

Morphology – The study of how the roots and prefixes, suffixes, and infixes can be combined to form words.

Syntax – The study of how words combine to form phrases, and how phrases combine to form clauses, and clauses to form sentences.

Semantics – The study of how meaning of syntactic units and how those meanings change when combined with each other.

Sociolinguistics – The study of how language establishes social relationships and reflects social processes, the purposes for which language is used, the sources of linguistic variation, the mechanisms of linguistic change, and how change spreads through a speech community.

Language Acquisition – The study of how languages are acquired and learned either as a first or additional language.

Poetics – The linguistic analysis of literary texts, to understand how writers can use the resources of linguistic structure to create language of beauty and power.

Endangered Languages – The study of language loss, methods of language documentation, and requirements for language stabilization and revitalization.

Computational Linguistics – The study of techniques for computationally processing language at all levels of linguistic structure.