About the Department

Overview of the Department

The linguistics department at the University of Pennsylvania is an interdisciplinary team. Our program has strong concentrations in several areas and a tradition of collaboration among its faculty. Founded by Zellig Harris in 1947, the Penn Linguistics Department is the oldest modern linguistics department in the United States. We have outstanding programs in the core disciplines of syntax and phonology, as well as in semantics, discourse and pragmatics, historical linguistics, phonetics, sociolinguistics, and several other areas of cognitive science. An exceptional source of strength is the presence of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) at Penn. Penn is also the home of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), a compiler and distributor of linguistic materials for language engineering research.

The broad range of our faculty allows our program to offer students a wide range of opportunities for study. The core of our program is in the generative tradition; our strengths in that and other areas make us particularly attractive to students interested in the cross-fertilization that results from the confrontation of empirical and theoretical perspectives on language structure. By our close collaboration with other programs (especially IRCS, which provides a valuable institutional framework for interdisciplinary research in linguistics, computer science, and psychology) we promote an awareness of the broad view of language that interdisciplinary study induces. Despite the breadth of our program, however, students are offered and expected to master the methods and results of their chosen areas of concentration in linguistics as a prerequisite to fruitful engagement in dialogue with others, both within and outside the program.

What is linguistics?

How does language work? We use it constantly, so it's easy to take for granted. Yet this remarkable ability makes humans unique in the world, and is intimately connected to the entire spectrum of human thought and activity.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language and its relationships to cognition, society, and history.

• Language is central to human nature and is a key to unlocking the structure of the mind. What does a person have to know to speak a language, and how do children master its complexities in so short a time? What does language teach us about cognition more generally? How might language have evolved in the human species?
• Language plays a central role in interactions among people in society, reflecting and illuminating the categories that are important to different cultures.
• Because language changes over time in regular ways, the study of related languages allows us to reconstruct past languages, opening a window on past societies and shedding further light on the nature of language itself.

If you think you might be interested in these topics, see "How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it" by Professor William Labov.