Areas of Research Interest

The Linguistics Department's primary areas of interest lie strongly in grammatical theory, which can be broken down roughly into syntax, phonology, and semantics. Individual faculty members also specialize in phonetics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, and second language acquisition theory. Other faculty interests include research into the history of linguistics as an academic discipline, mathematical linguistics, and language typology. Languages of faculty research include Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Jamaican Creole, Arabic, Siswati, Sandawe, Cherokee, Swahili, Austronesian languages of Taiwan, the Athabaskan languages, and Sahaptin. Information is also available about the interests of individual faculty members.

In addition, the department often collaborates with other departments such as Speech and Hearing Sciences, Anthropology, Philosophy, Psychology, and Computer Science to expand its course offerings.

Syntax

Several faculty members in the Department work in the area of syntactic theory. All such research takes place within the generative tradition, which, broadly characterized, sees grammars as formal cognitive systems. In addition to syntax per se, UW linguists have made many contributions to the understanding of the interface between syntax and other levels of grammar, in particular phonology, morphology, semantics, and discourse.

Phonology

The Department's phonologists concern themselves with aspects of modern generative phonology. Of primary interest is the phonology-morphology interface as characterized by prosodic morphology and lexical phonology, as well as the phonology-syntax interface and theories of phonological change over time. Faculty interests also include research in metrical phonology, feature geometry, and the phonetics-phonology interface.

Semantics

We are mainly concerned with formal semantics, which analyzes the semantics of natural language in terms of mathematical concepts such as set and function. Also of interest are such topics as the relation between syntax and semantics, the semantics of non-European languages, and the relation between formal semantics and so-called lexical semantics.

Phonetics

We are interested in a broad range of theoretical and practical issues in articulatory and acoustic phonetics. Some issues include speech perception and spoken word processing, gestural timing, and the role of phonetic explanation in phonological theory. Other phonetic research include acoustic and articulatory description of spoken language.

Sociolinguistics

We are interested in a broad range of issues pertaining to language in society, particularly social variation in the grammars and lexicons of languages and dialects. Faculty also study nonstandard language, diglossia, pidgins and creoles, and gender differences in speech.

Computational Linguistics

The department is currently building up a program in computational linguistics. Current areas of interest include grammar engineering, building computational tools for the documentation of underdescribed languages, and Natural Language Processing in general. We expect our areas of expertise to broaden as we hire additional computational linguists during the 2004-2005 school year for our new Professional Master's in Computational Linguistics. UW linguistics students also have opportunities to work with faculty in EE, CS and the Information School on research in machine translation, speech recognition, and biomedical informatics, among others.

Second Language Acquisition Theory

Faculty members research the cognitive mechanisms underlying the acquisition of second language. Questions taken on include whether second language acquisition parallels first in crucial ways, and the extent to which it is governed by principles of universal grammar.

If you have any further questions or comments please contact us at phoneme@u.washington.edu

Last modified 8/26/04 by Joyce Parvi