德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校

Linguistics is the discipline that studies the structures, acquisition, and histories of human languages around the world. Linguists are not, then, principally people who know many languages, but rather people who investigate how a language is organized and what features all languages exhibit.

The Department of Linguistics and TESOL seeks to deepen our understanding of language by examining how it is represented, used, and processed. Our faculty members work toward this goal through research and teaching in theoretical linguistics, focusing on phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics as well as the interfaces among these domains of inquiry. In order to explore questions in these areas, we use multiple methods, including field methods, corpus-based methods, and experimental research methods, to collect and analyze data from a wide range of the world's languages, and from both native and non-native speakers of these languages. This approach to the scientific study of language is the primary focus of our BA degree in Linguistics.

In addition, the department has a separate track in the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) offered through our TESOL certificate. These courses train professionals who will teach English to second and foreign-language learners. Our TESOL students build a strong foundation in teaching methodologies, language testing, second language acquisition, and other applied areas of linguistics.

The study of linguistics prepares students for a variety of careers, among them teaching English to speakers of other languages in the United States and abroad, brand naming (lexicon work), information and intelligence analyst, language policy, forensic linguistics and the law, computer analysis of language, language education, and graduate study in linguistics. Above all, students in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL are made especially aware of the complex world in which we live by studying a universal and most definitive human experience: language.