2024-2025 Undergraduate Course Catalog 
    
    Nov 14, 2024  
2024-2025 Undergraduate Course Catalog

Linguistic Studies, BA


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Contact

Director

Amanda Brown
323C H.B. Crouse
abrown08@syr.edu

Undergraduate Advisor

Christopher R. Green
330 H.B. Crouse

Faculty

Core LIN faculty: Tej K. Bhatia, Amanda Brown, Christopher R. Green, Gerald R. Greenberg, Rania Habib, Jaklin Kornfilt, Kenji Oda, Adam Roth Singerman, Maria Emma Ticio Quesada

Select affiliated faculty: Janice Dowell, Kevan Edwards, Stephanie McMillan, Jonathan Preston, Michael Rieppel, Ellyn Riley, Sylvia Sierra, Victoria Tumanova, Robert Van Gulick

Linguistics is the study of the nature and use of language and provides insight into the workings of the human mind. The major ties together studies in many areas, such as anthropology, child and family studies, computer science, English and other languages, geography, literary criticism, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, speech communication, speech pathology, and linguistics proper.

LIN 201  is an introduction to linguistic studies and is a prerequisite to the major and to advanced courses. It does not, however, count toward major requirements.

For all Arts and Sciences|Maxwell students, successful completion of a bachelor’s degree in this major requires a minimum of 120 credits, 96 of which must be Arts and Sciences|Maxwell credits, completion of the Liberal Arts Core requirements, and the requirements for this major that are listed below.

Dual Enrollments:

Students dually enrolled in Newhouse* and Arts and Sciences|Maxwell will complete a minimum of 122 credits, with at least 90 credits in Arts and Sciences|Maxwell coursework and an Arts and Sciences|Maxwell major.

*Students dually enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences|Maxwell as first year students must complete the Liberal Arts Core. Students who transfer to the dual program after their first year as singly enrolled students in the Newhouse School will satisfy general requirements for the dual degree program by completing the Newhouse Core Requirements.

Student Learning Outcomes


1. Analyze claims about human communication and about the innate language competence in humans
2. Explain claims about specific languages and the universal principles that underlie the knowledge of all languages
3. Analyze the structure of one or more particular languages and the cultural context associated with its use 
4. Apply the social, cognitive, physiological, historical methods of linguistics to related areas including language and thought, language acquisition, language comprehension, language production, language use, and language teaching

Major Requirements


Linguistic studies majors and prospective majors must consult the director of the program before registration.

Students must fulfill the following language requirements:

  • the Liberal Arts Core Language Skills requirement in one language; and
  • successfully complete at least 6 credits in an additional language (other than English) that is structurally significantly different from the language used to fulfill the Liberal Arts Core requirement. The following pairs of languages cannot be used to fulfill this requirement: Korean/Japanese, Russian/Polish, Arabic/Hebrew. No pair of languages from the following group may be used to fulfill this requirement: Spanish/Portuguese/Italian/French/Latin.

In addition, students successfully complete three core courses

Major requirements also include the successful completion of at least 18 credits of additional work, of which at least 9 credits are in courses numbered 300 or above. The 18 credits must be in approved linguistic studies courses, chosen from at least three of the following groups:

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