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211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Many people find it hard to decide on their linguistics research topics because of the assumed complexities involved. They struggle to choose easy research paper topics for English language too because they think it could be too simple for a university or college level certificate.

All that you need to learn about Linguistics and English is sprawled across syntax, phonetics, morphology, phonology, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, and a few others. To easily create a top-notch essay or conduct a research study, you can consider this list of research topics in English language below for your university or college use. Note that you can fine-tune these to suit your interests.

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are:

• An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people
• An overview of the hate language in the course against religion
• Identify the determinants of hate language and the means of propagation
• Evaluate a literature and examine how Linguistics is applied to the understanding of minor languages
• Consider the impact of social media in the development of slangs
• An overview of political slang and its use amongst New York teenagers
• Examine the relevance of Linguistics in a digitalized world
• Analyze foul language and how it’s used to oppress minors
• Identify the role of language in the national identity of a socially dynamic society
• Attempt an explanation to how the language barrier could affect the social life of an individual in a new society
• Discuss the means through which language can enrich cultural identities
• Examine the concept of bilingualism and how it applies in the real world
• Analyze the possible strategies for teaching a foreign language
• Discuss the priority of teachers in the teaching of grammar to non-native speakers
• Choose a school of your choice and observe the slang used by its students: analyze how it affects their social lives
• Attempt a critical overview of racist languages
• What does endangered language means and how does it apply in the real world?
• A critical overview of your second language and why it is a second language
• What are the motivators of speech and why are they relevant?
• Analyze the difference between the different types of communications and their significance to specially-abled persons
• Give a critical overview of five literature on sign language
• Evaluate the distinction between the means of language comprehension between an adult and a teenager
• Consider a native American group and evaluate how cultural diversity has influenced their language
• Analyze the complexities involved in code-switching and code-mixing
• Give a critical overview of the importance of language to a teenager
• Attempt a forensic overview of language accessibility and what it means
• What do you believe are the means of communications and what are their uniqueness?
• Attempt a study of Islamic poetry and its role in language development
• Attempt a study on the role of Literature in language development
• Evaluate the Influence of metaphors and other literary devices in the depth of each sentence
• Identify the role of literary devices in the development of proverbs in any African country
• Cognitive Linguistics: analyze two pieces of Literature that offers a critical view of perception
• Identify and analyze the complexities in unspoken words
• Expression is another kind of language: discuss
• Identify the significance of symbols in the evolution of language
• Discuss how learning more than a single language promote cross-cultural developments
• Analyze how the loss of a mother tongue affect the language Efficiency of a community
• Critically examine how sign language works
• Using literature from the medieval era, attempt a study of the evolution of language
• Identify how wars have led to the reduction in the popularity of a language of your choice across any country of the world
• Critically examine five Literature on why accent changes based on environment
• What are the forces that compel the comprehension of language in a child
• Identify and explain the difference between the listening and speaking skills and their significance in the understanding of language
• Give a critical overview of how natural language is processed
• Examine the influence of language on culture and vice versa
• It is possible to understand a language even without living in that society: discuss
• Identify the arguments regarding speech defects
• Discuss how the familiarity of language informs the creation of slangs
• Explain the significance of religious phrases and sacred languages
• Explore the roots and evolution of incantations in Africa

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

You may as well need interesting Linguistics topics based on sociolinguistic purposes for your research. Sociolinguistics is the study and recording of natural speech. It’s primarily the casual status of most informal conversations. You can consider the following Sociolinguistic research topics for your research:

• What makes language exceptional to a particular person?
• How does language form a unique means of expression to writers?
• Examine the kind of speech used in health and emergencies
• Analyze the language theory explored by family members during dinner
• Evaluate the possible variation of language based on class
• Evaluate the language of racism, social tension, and sexism
• Discuss how Language promotes social and cultural familiarities
• Give an overview of identity and language
• Examine why some language speakers enjoy listening to foreigners who speak their native language
• Give a forensic analysis of his the language of entertainment is different to the language in professional settings
• Give an understanding of how Language changes
• Examine the Sociolinguistics of the Caribbeans
• Consider an overview of metaphor in France
• Explain why the direct translation of written words is incomprehensible in Linguistics
• Discuss the use of language in marginalizing a community
• Analyze the history of Arabic and the culture that enhanced it
• Discuss the growth of French and the influences of other languages
• Examine how the English language developed and its interdependence on other languages
• Give an overview of cultural diversity and Linguistics in teaching
• Challenge the attachment of speech defect with disability of language listening and speaking abilities
• Explore the uniqueness of language between siblings
• Explore the means of making requests between a teenager and his parents
• Observe and comment on how students relate with their teachers through language
• Observe and comment on the communication of strategy of parents and teachers
• Examine the connection of understanding first language with academic excellence

Language Research Topics

Numerous languages exist in different societies. This is why you may seek to understand the motivations behind language through these Linguistics project ideas. You can consider the following interesting Linguistics topics and their application to language:

• What does language shift mean?
• Discuss the stages of English language development?
• Examine the position of ambiguity in a romantic Language of your choice
• Why are some languages called romantic languages?
• Observe the strategies of persuasion through Language
• Discuss the connection between symbols and words
• Identify the language of political speeches
• Discuss the effectiveness of language in an indigenous cultural revolution
• Trace the motivators for spoken language
• What does language acquisition mean to you?
• Examine three pieces of literature on language translation and its role in multilingual accessibility
• Identify the science involved in language reception
• Interrogate with the context of language disorders
• Examine how psychotherapy applies to victims of language disorders
• Study the growth of Hindi despite colonialism
• Critically appraise the term, language erasure
• Examine how colonialism and war is responsible for the loss of language
• Give an overview of the difference between sounds and letters and how they apply to the German language
• Explain why the placement of verb and preposition is different in German and English languages
• Choose two languages of your choice and examine their historical relationship
• Discuss the strategies employed by people while learning new languages
• Discuss the role of all the figures of speech in the advancement of language
• Analyze the complexities of autism and its victims
• Offer a linguist approach to language uniqueness between a Down Syndrome child and an autist
• Express dance as a language
• Express music as a language
• Express language as a form of language
• Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in the decline of languages in South Africa
• Discuss the development of the Greek language
• Critically review two literary texts, one from the medieval era and another published a decade ago, and examine the language shifts

Linguistics Essay Topics

You may also need Linguistics research topics for your Linguistics essays. As a linguist in the making, these can help you consider controversies in Linguistics as a discipline and address them through your study. You can consider:

• The connection of sociolinguistics in comprehending interests in multilingualism
• Write on your belief of how language encourages sexism
• What do you understand about the differences between British and American English?
• Discuss how slangs grew and how they started
• Consider how age leads to loss of language
• Review how language is used in formal and informal conversation
• Discuss what you understand by polite language
• Discuss what you know by hate language
• Evaluate how language has remained flexible throughout history
• Mimicking a teacher is a form of exercising hate Language: discuss
• Body Language and verbal speech are different things: discuss
• Language can be exploitative: discuss
• Do you think language is responsible for inciting aggression against the state?
• Can you justify the structural representation of any symbol of your choice?
• Religious symbols are not ordinary Language: what are your perspective on day-to-day languages and sacred ones?
• Consider the usage of language by an English man and someone of another culture
• Discuss the essence of code-mixing and code-switching
• Attempt a psychological assessment on the role of language in academic development
• How does language pose a challenge to studying?
• Choose a multicultural society of your choice and explain the problem they face
• What forms does Language use in expression?
• Identify the reasons behind unspoken words and actions
• Why do universal languages exist as a means of easy communication?
• Examine the role of the English language in the world
• Examine the role of Arabic in the world
• Examine the role of romantic languages in the world
• Evaluate the significance of each teaching Resources in a language classroom
• Consider an assessment of language analysis
• Why do people comprehend beyond what is written or expressed?
• What is the impact of hate speech on a woman?
• Do you believe that grammatical errors are how everyone’s comprehension of language is determined?
• Observe the Influence of technology in language learning and development
• Which parts of the body are responsible for understanding new languages
• How has language informed development?
• Would you say language has improved human relations or worsened it considering it as a tool for violence?
• Would you say language in a black populous state is different from its social culture in white populous states?
• Give an overview of the English language in Nigeria
• Give an overview of the English language in Uganda
• Give an overview of the English language in India
• Give an overview of Russian in Europe
• Give a conceptual analysis on stress and how it works
• Consider the means of vocabulary development and its role in cultural relationships
• Examine the effects of Linguistics in language
• Present your understanding of sign language
• What do you understand about descriptive language and prescriptive Language?

List of Research Topics in English Language

You may need English research topics for your next research. These are topics that are socially crafted for you as a student of language in any institution. You can consider the following for in-depth analysis:

• Examine the travail of women in any feminist text of your choice
• Examine the movement of feminist literature in the Industrial period
• Give an overview of five Gothic literature and what you understand from them
• Examine rock music and how it emerged as a genre
• Evaluate the cultural association with Nina Simone’s music
• What is the relevance of Shakespeare in English literature?
• How has literature promoted the English language?
• Identify the effect of spelling errors in the academic performance of students in an institution of your choice
• Critically survey a university and give rationalize the literary texts offered as Significant
• Examine the use of feminist literature in advancing the course against patriarchy
• Give an overview of the themes in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
• Express the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s diction in contemporary literature
• Examine the predominant devices in the works of William Shakespeare
• Explain the predominant devices in the works of Christopher Marlowe
• Charles Dickens and his works: express the dominating themes in his Literature
• Why is Literature described as the mirror of society?
• Examine the issues of feminism in Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and Bernadine Evaristos’s “Girl, Woman, Other”
• Give an overview of the stylistics employed in the writing of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
• Describe the language of advertisement in social media and newspapers
• Describe what poetic Language means
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing on Mexican Americans
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing in Indian Americans
• Discuss the influence of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” on satirical literature
• Examine the Linguistics features of “Native Son” by Richard Wright
• What is the role of indigenous literature in promoting cultural identities
• How has literature informed cultural consciousness?
• Analyze five literature on semantics and their Influence on the study
• Assess the role of grammar in day to day communications
• Observe the role of multidisciplinary approaches in understanding the English language
• What does stylistics mean while analyzing medieval literary texts?
• Analyze the views of philosophers on language, society, and culture

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

For your college work, you may need to undergo a study of any phenomenon in the world. Note that they could be Linguistics essay topics or mainly a research study of an idea of your choice. Thus, you can choose your research ideas from any of the following:

• The concept of fairness in a democratic Government
• The capacity of a leader isn’t in his or her academic degrees
• The concept of discrimination in education
• The theory of discrimination in Islamic states
• The idea of school policing
• A study on grade inflation and its consequences
• A study of taxation and Its importance to the economy from a citizen’s perspectives
• A study on how eloquence lead to discrimination amongst high school students
• A study of the influence of the music industry in teens
• An Evaluation of pornography and its impacts on College students
• A descriptive study of how the FBI works according to Hollywood
• A critical consideration of the cons and pros of vaccination
• The health effect of sleep disorders
• An overview of three literary texts across three genres of Literature and how they connect to you
• A critical overview of “King Oedipus”: the role of the supernatural in day to day life
• Examine the novel “12 Years a Slave” as a reflection of servitude and brutality exerted by white slave owners
• Rationalize the emergence of racist Literature with concrete examples
• A study of the limits of literature in accessing rural readers
• Analyze the perspectives of modern authors on the Influence of medieval Literature on their craft
• What do you understand by the mortality of a literary text?
• A study of controversial Literature and its role in shaping the discussion
• A critical overview of three literary texts that dealt with domestic abuse and their role in changing the narratives about domestic violence
• Choose three contemporary poets and analyze the themes of their works
• Do you believe that contemporary American literature is the repetition of unnecessary themes already treated in the past?
• A study of the evolution of Literature and its styles
• The use of sexual innuendos in literature
• The use of sexist languages in literature and its effect on the public
• The disaster associated with media reports of fake news
• Conduct a study on how language is used as a tool for manipulation
• Attempt a criticism of a controversial Literary text and why it shouldn’t be studied or sold in the first place

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

With these topics, you can commence your research with ease. However, if you need professional writing help for any part of the research, you can scout here online for the best research paper writing service.

There are several expert writers on ENL hosted on our website that you can consider for a fast response on your research study at a cheap price.

As students, you may be unable to cover every part of your research on your own. This inability is the reason you should consider expert writers for custom research topics in Linguistics approved by your professor for high grades.

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Doctoral Program

The Ph.D. program emphasizes rigorous theoretical work that has at its base a firm empirical foundation in language data. 

Students are provided with a broad-based background in linguistics, teaching experience in the classroom and other forums, and opportunities for original and high-quality research.  Our Ph.D. students write dissertations on a wide range of topics spanning and bridging many subareas of the field.  See our Ph.D. Alumni  page for dissertation titles and job placement information.

Overview of the Program

Through the completion of advanced coursework and strong methodological and analytical training, the  Ph.D. program prepares students to make original contributions to knowledge in linguistics, to articulate the results of their work, and to demonstrate its significance to linguistics and related fields.  At every stage in the program, students are encouraged to present and publish their research and to develop active professional profiles. 

Students generally complete the program in five years

• Coursework in core areas of linguistics, chosen by each student in consultation with faculty advisors to build the foundation that best suits their interests and goals.
• Fall Quarter: Includes seminar to introduce students to the research of faculty in the department
• Winter Quarter: Includes participation in small research groups or in one-on-one apprenticeships
• Spring Quarter: Includes beginning to work on the first of 2 qualifying research papers

Years 2 and 3

• Balance shifts from coursework to development of research skills
• Students complete two qualifying papers and then selects a principal advisor and committee for their dissertation by the end of year 3.

Years 4 and 5

• Devoted to dissertation and advanced research

Teaching Experience

As they move through the Ph.D. program, students also gain teaching experience by serving as teaching assistants in their second, third, and fourth year of graduate study. They also have access to the many programs provided by Stanford's Vice Provost for  Teaching and Learning , including the varied resources of the Teaching Commons .

Offers of admission to the Linguistics P.h.D program include funding for the full five years of doctoral study, including tuition and stipend, regardless of citizenship. 

We also encourage our applicants to apply for as many external fellowships and scholarships as they are eligible for; a compilation of funding opportunities for Linguistics graduate students can be found on our  Fellowship and Funding Information page .  Applicants should note that the deadlines for these fellowships are typically in the fall of the year prior to admission.

In addition, the  Knight-Hennessy Scholars  program is designed to build a multidisciplinary community of Stanford graduate students dedicated to finding creative solutions to the world's greatest challenges. The program awards up to 100 high-achieving students every year with full funding to pursue a graduate education at Stanford, including the Ph.D. degree in Linguistics. 

Additional information is available about the student budget , Stanford graduate fellowships , and other support programs .

Outside the classroom, there are many opportunities, both formal and informal, for the discussion of linguistic issues and ongoing research, including colloquia, workshops, and reading groups.

Partnership Opportunities

Although not part of the formal doctoral program, there are numerous opportunities for research and development work at the Center for the Study of Language and Information and  off-campus at local companies.  

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PhD in Linguistics

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Aims of the PhD

Human language is a multifaceted phenomenon. It is simultaneously a property of individual minds and of whole speech communities, and thus both internal and external to us. It both shapes and is shaped by our societies over time. It is a combination of sound (or sign), which has physical properties that can be measured, and meaning, which does not. Accordingly, becoming a linguistic researcher involves mastering a variety of methods, both quantitative and qualitative. The PhD in Linguistics at BU aims to produce scholars who are versatile enough to be experts in both of these aspects of linguistic inquiry, yet skilled enough to do cutting-edge research in a particular subfield of the discipline. We offer a solid grounding in a range of research methods, including field methods, quantitative methods, and computational methods.

Learning Outcomes

Students graduating with a PhD in Linguistics will demonstrate:

• broad knowledge of the discipline
• deeper knowledge in a specialized area or subfield
• ability to carry out a significant piece of independent research (which implies knowledge of and ability to use research methodologies in order to complete the research)

Prerequisites

The GRE (Graduate Record Examination) is not required to apply.

Entering students are expected to have completed introductory classes in: 

• phonetics/phonology (e.g., GRS LX 601)
• syntax (e.g., GRS LX 621)
• semantics/pragmatics (e.g., GRS LX 631)

Students who do not have sufficient background in linguistics must complete additional coursework to fulfill the above prerequisites prior to entry or during the first year. Note: if completed at BU, GRS LX 601, 621, and 631 will not count toward the PhD course requirements.

Admissions & Funding

The deadline for application to enter the program in Fall 2023 is January 6, 2023.  Information about the graduate admissions process ( including the application process and requirements ) is available at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (GRS) website:

We anticipate being able to admit about five students per year. All admitted students will receive full coverage of tuition costs plus a fellowship for five years. For further information about funding, consult the GRS website above.

Requirements

Course requirements.

The PhD requires successful completion of 64 credits at the graduate level, including three core courses: 

• GRS LX 703 Phonological Analysis
• GRS LX 722 Intermediate Syntax
• GRS LX 732 Intermediate Semantics

Six additional courses from the four areas below, with two courses each in two of the areas, and one course each in the remaining two areas:

• advanced phonetics, phonology, or morphology (e.g., GRS LX 706)
• advanced syntax, semantics, or pragmatics (e.g., GRS LX 723, 736)
• linguistic research methodology
• language acquisition or socio-historical linguistics

A 4-credit graduate proseminar sequence (GRS LX 801 & 802) is typically taken in the second year.

Finally, six additional courses (including up to 8 credits of directed study) are taken in Linguistics or related fields that comprise a specialization , which will generally be in the area of the dissertation. These courses will be decided upon by the student in conjunction with their advisor, whose approval is required.

Language Requirement

The PhD requires demonstration of graduate-level reading proficiency in two foreign languages (one of which may be English, for non-native speakers) by the end of the third year of enrollment.

These proficiencies can be demonstrated through any of:

• a language examination
• successful completion of a non-credit graduate-level foreign language reading course offered at BU
• the equivalent of two years of undergraduate study of the language at BU (or successful completion of any higher-level language course taught in the language)

Graduate-level foreign language reading courses offered at BU include:

• GRS LF 621 Reading French for Graduate Students
• GRS LG 621 Reading German for Graduate Students
• GRS LI 621 Reading Italian for Graduate Students
• GRS LS 621 Reading Spanish for Graduate Students

Qualifying Examinations

To advance to candidacy, students must satisfactorily complete and defend two substantial research papers in different areas of the field (the first by the end of the fourth semester, the second by the end of the sixth semester of enrollment).

Each Qualifying Paper (QP) will be planned and carried out under the supervision of a Linguistics faculty member with expertise appropriate to the relevant project and, upon completion, will be defended orally and approved by an examining committee, composed of the first and second reader as well as a third faculty member determined by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) in consultation with the student.

A brief proposal for each QP must be submitted, with signed approval of a first and second reader (who have been approved by the DGS and who have agreed to advise the student on the proposed project), by October 15 of the academic year in which the project is to be completed. For the second QP, a topic approval form, in which the student explains how the second QP differs from their first QP, must also be submitted, in advance of the proposal approval form.

Dissertation and Final Oral Examination

PhD candidates will demonstrate their abilities for independent study in a dissertation representing original research or creative scholarship.

A prospectus for the dissertation must be completed and approved by the readers, the DGS, and the Department Chair.

Candidates must undergo a final oral examination in which they defend their dissertation as a valuable contribution to knowledge in their field and demonstrate a mastery of their field of specialization in relation to their dissertation.

All portions of the dissertation and final oral examination must be completed as outlined in the GRS general requirements for the PhD degree:

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Ph.d. program.

The main components of the Linguistics Ph.D. program are as follows:

• Course Requirements
• Language Requirement
• Generals Papers
• Dissertation
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All requirements, including two generals papers, should ideally be completed by the end of the third year, but in no case later than the end of the fourth. The dissertation prospectus is due on October 15 of the fall term of the fourth year. Failure to meet program requirements in a timely fashion may result in termination of candidacy. 

First-year students are advised by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) until they select a major field from the regular departmental faculty. Thereafter, progress toward completion of the Ph.D. requirements continues to be monitored by the DGS, but primary responsibility for overseeing study shifts to the major advisor. Students are free to change their major advisor at any time. By the end of the second year they should also select a co-advisor, who serves as a secondary advisor and faculty mentor.

Harvard Linguistics Graduate Student Handbook

Progress to the Degree (updated 7/1/2015)

A B+ average must be maintained in each year of graduate study. Grades below B- cannot be counted toward departmental requirements; two grades below B- in required courses will result in termination of candidacy. Ordinarily, a grade of Incomplete can only be converted into a letter grade if the work is made up before the end of the following term. No grade of Incomplete can be used to satisfy a departmental requirement.   No two programs of study are alike, but students should typically plan to complete the requirements for the degree according to the timetable below. Departures from this schedule must be approved by the main advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies.   Years G1 and G2: Course requirements are satisfied. By the end of the G2 year, the first generals paper should be well underway.   Year G3: Teaching duties begin. The first generals paper should be defended before the end of the fall term, and the second generals paper by the end of the spring term.   Year G4: Teaching duties continue. A thesis prospectus, naming a dissertation committee, is due on October 15 of the fall term; the committee must be chaired or co-chaired by a member of the Department of Linguistics and must include at least two members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Dissertation Completion Fellowship applications are due at midyear.   Year G5: The thesis is completed and defended in the spring.

A.M. Degree  (updated 7/1/2015)

Graduate students who have completed two years of residence, who have fulfilled all the course requirements and language requirements for the Ph.D., and who have successfully defended one Generals paper, are eligible to petition for a Master’s (A.M.) degree.  

Note that there is no master’s program in Linguistics.                     

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Linguistics, PhD

The Ph.D. program in Linguistics at Penn embraces a wide range of theoretical specializations and methodologies. What unites them is a commitment to careful and explicit formal analysis of the human capacity for learning and using language.

The core of our program is the formal generative tradition, but we encourage the cross-fertilization that results from the confrontation of empirical and theoretical perspectives on language structure. By our close collaboration with other programs (such as computer science and psychology) we promote an awareness of the broad view of language that interdisciplinary study induces. In addition to broad training, 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.

For more information: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/graduate/

View the University’s Academic Rules for PhD Programs .

Required Courses

The total course units required for graduation is 20. A minimum of 12 course units must be taken at the University of Pennsylvania.

The degree and major requirements displayed are intended as a guide for students entering in the Fall of 2023 and later. Students should consult with their academic program regarding final certifications and requirements for graduation.

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The Linguistics Section is unique in the UK in that it integrates theoretical and applied linguistics in a single academic department. The Linguistics Section provides great variety and flexibility in course contents as well as subject-specific training and diversity of intellectual interactions. PhD topics in the range of research specialisms represented in the Section and beyond the Section in the MMLL Faculty are accepted. Students may choose to focus on a theoretically oriented study of the language sciences (e.g. interest in the syntactic organisation or sound structure of different languages or in the analysis of meaning in semantics and pragmatics), but may also be interested in a more applied direction of Linguistics (e.g. language acquisition, language processing, data mining of language corpora) or may choose to look at Linguistics from a specific language point of view (e.g. Italian linguistics). 

In British universities, the PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) is traditionally awarded solely on the basis of a thesis, a substantial piece of writing that reports original research into a closely defined area of enquiry. Within linguistics, some PhD students may do most of their work in libraries, spend part of their time collecting and analysing fieldwork data, or carry out experiments in the phonetics laboratory or psycholinguistics laboratory. The completion of the PhD thesis is generally expected to take three to four years. It is also possible to take a part-time route, and the expected timeframe would be five to seven years.  

In addition to providing special supervision, both the Linguistics Section and the MMLL Faculty run a programme of professional training for the benefit of all research students.  The programme includes seminars and workshops on library resources, giving conference papers, publishing, applications and interviews, teaching skills, specialist linguistic training, and film-making. The University runs a central programme covering a range of topics from PhD research development to language training and writing and editing skills. Students also have access to a Social Sciences research methods training programme. If you wish, you are likely to be given the opportunity of gaining experience in small group teaching for colleges. There may also be opportunities to gain some experience in language teaching in the MMLL Faculty.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the programme, candidates will have acquired excellent skills, experience and knowledge to undertake postdoctoral work (research and teaching) or another related profession.

For Cambridge students applying to continue from the MPhil by Advanced Study to PhD, the minimum academic requirement is an overall distinction in the MPhil.

For Cambridge students applying to continue from the MPhil by Thesis to PhD, the usual academic requirement is a pass in the MPhil.

All applications are judged on their merits, and students must demonstrate their suitability to undertake doctoral level research.

If the Master's degree from which the applicant is progressing is not the MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, the Master's degree has to contain a substantial Linguistics component. 

The Postgraduate Virtual Open Day usually takes place at the end of October. It’s a great opportunity to ask questions to admissions staff and academics, explore the Colleges virtually, and to find out more about courses, the application process and funding opportunities. Visit the  Postgraduate Open Day  page for more details.

See further the  Postgraduate Admissions Events  pages for other events relating to Postgraduate study, including study fairs, visits and international events.

Departments

This course is advertised in the following departments:

• Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
• Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Key Information

3-4 years full-time, 4-7 years part-time, study mode : research, doctor of philosophy, department of theoretical and applied linguistics this course is advertised in multiple departments. please see the overview tab for more details., course - related enquiries, application - related enquiries, course on department website, dates and deadlines:, lent 2024 (closed).

Some courses can close early. See the Deadlines page for guidance on when to apply.

Michaelmas 2024

Funding deadlines.

These deadlines apply to applications for courses starting in Michaelmas 2024, Lent 2025 and Easter 2025.

Similar Courses

• Theoretical and Applied Linguistics by thesis MPhil
• Theoretical and Applied Linguistics by Advanced Study MPhil
• Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence MPhil
• Computer Science PhD
• Education (Research in Second Language Education) MPhil

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• PhD in Linguistics

Human language is a multifaceted phenomenon. It is simultaneously a property of individual minds and of whole speech communities, and thus both internal and external to us. It both shapes and is shaped by our societies over time. It is a combination of sound (or sign), which has physical properties that can be measured, and meaning, which does not. Accordingly, becoming a linguist involves mastering a variety of methods, both quantitative and qualitative. The PhD in Linguistics at Boston University aims to produce scholars who are versatile enough to be experts in both of these aspects of linguistic inquiry, yet skilled enough to do cutting-edge research in a particular subfield of the discipline. We offer a solid grounding in a range of research methods, including field methods, quantitative methods, and computational methods.

Learning Outcomes

Students graduating with a PhD in Linguistics are expected to demonstrate:

• A broad knowledge of the discipline.
• A deeper knowledge in a specialized area or subfield.
• The ability to carry out a significant piece of independent research (which implies knowledge of and ability to use research methodologies in order to complete the research).

Course Requirements

The PhD in Linguistics requires successful completion of 64 credits at the graduate level, including:

• GRS LX 703 Phonological Analysis
• GRS LX 722 Intermediate Syntax: Modeling Syntactic Knowledge
• GRS LX 732 Intermediate Semantics: The Grammatical Construction of Meaning
• Advanced courses in phonetics, phonology, or the phonology/morphology interface (normally including GRS LX 706)
• Advanced courses in syntax, the syntax/morphology interface, semantics, or pragmatics (normally including GRS LX 723 and/or LX 736)
• Linguistic research methodology
• Language acquisition or the study of language as a social or a historical phenomenon
• Two Graduate Proseminars in Linguistics, GRS LX 801 and GRS LX 802
• Six additional graduate-level courses (including up to 8 credits of directed study) in linguistics or related fields sufficient to define a specialization that will be the area within which the dissertation is written. These courses will be decided upon by the student in conjunction with their advisor, whose prior approval is required. Note that GRS LX 601 Phonetics, LX 621 Syntax, and LX 631 Semantics will not be counted toward the PhD course requirements.

Language Requirement

All students pursuing a PhD in Linguistics are required to demonstrate graduate-level reading proficiency in two foreign languages (one of which may be English, for non-native speakers) by the end of the third year of enrollment. Language proficiency can be demonstrated through a language examination, successful completion of a noncredit graduate-level foreign language reading course offered by Boston University, or the equivalent of two years of undergraduate study of the language at Boston University.

Qualifying Examination

A candidate for the doctoral degree must satisfactorily complete two substantial research papers in different areas of the field (the first by the end of the fourth semester, the second no later than the sixth semester of enrollment). Each Qualifying Paper (QP) will be planned and carried out under the supervision of a Linguistics faculty member with expertise appropriate to the relevant project; it will be defended orally and approved by an examining committee, composed of the first and second reader, as well as a third faculty member determined by the DGS in consultation with the student. A brief proposal for each QP must be submitted, with signed approval of a first and second reader (who have been approved by the DGS and who have agreed to advise the student on the proposed project) by mid-October of the academic year in which the project must be completed.

Dissertation and Final Oral Examination

Candidates shall demonstrate their abilities for independent study in a dissertation representing original research or creative scholarship. A prospectus for the dissertation must be completed and approved by the readers, the Director of Graduate Studies, and the Department Chair. Candidates must undergo a final oral examination in which they defend their dissertation as a valuable contribution to knowledge in their field and demonstrate a mastery of their field of specialization in relation to their dissertation. All portions of the dissertation and final oral examination must be completed as outlined in the GRS General Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree .

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Boston University is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE).

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Linguistics and English Language PhD

Awards: PhD

Funding opportunities

Programme website: Linguistics and English Language

The transformative supervision meetings, labs, professional training and departmental research seminars are all conducive to a thriving linguistics training. I am exposed to cutting-edge training and research. This inspiring environment allows me to conduct world-leading research in bilingualism. Katerina Pantoula Current PhD student in Linguistics & English Language

Discovery Day

Join us online on 18th April to learn more about postgraduate study at Edinburgh

View sessions and register

Research profile

We have an outstanding international reputation in many areas of Linguistics and English Language research.

Linguistics & English Language is rated 3rd in the UK by Times Higher Education for the quality and breadth of the research using the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021).

We can offer expert supervision across a wide range of topics, including:

• Applied Linguistics
• Developmental linguistics, including first and second language acquisition
• Discourse and conversation analysis
• Historical English linguistics, including the syntax, morphology, and phonology from the earliest periods to the present day
• Language evolution
• Linguistic fieldwork
• Morphology, including word formation
• Multilingualism
• Phonetics and phonology, including diachronic phonology and the phonology of varieties of English, Scots and their history
• Sociolinguistics
• Speech technology
• Syntax and semantics, including theoretical syntax, descriptive syntax of English, diachronic syntax and both lexical and formal semantics
• Varieties of English, both British and international

Research groups

Our expertise clusters in a number of research groups and research centres:

• Developmental Linguistics
• English Language
• Language Evolution & Computation (LEC)
• Language in Context
• Language Variation and Change (LVC)
• Meaning and Grammar
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Centre for Language Evolution
• Bilingualism Matters

Research in speech technology is carried out at the Centre for Speech Technology Research, a collaboration between the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and Informatics:

• Centre for Speech Technology Research

Training and support

You will receive supervision by at least two members of academic staff, who will meet regularly with you to discuss your progress and wider issues in your field of study.

This may include:

• discussion of relevant literature (for example, journal articles and book chapters)
• Firming up of research proposal
• Preparation for fieldwork and data collection
• discussion of draft chapters of your thesis
• preparation for conference presentations

Research students are assigned to research groups, each of which hosts regular research activities.

The department also has a visiting speaker series (the Linguistic Circle), and you are encouraged to participate in the School’s Language at Edinburgh research network.

The unrivalled holdings of the University and National Libraries and the National Archives of Scotland make study of this subject at Edinburgh especially attractive.

Our students become part of one of the biggest communities of linguists in the United Kingdom.

We have state-of-the art technical and laboratory facilities:

• School resources
• Find out more about our community

The School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences is home to a large, supportive and active student community, hosting events and activities throughout the year which you can join. As a postgraduate student, you will have access to a range of research resources, state-of-the-art facilities research seminars and reading groups.

Career opportunities

While many of our PhD graduates choose to remain in academia as lecturers and researchers, going onto post-doctoral opportunities or progressing into faculty positions, some pursue employment and careers in other sectors.

Important application information

Find a research opportunity that matches your interests.

• View our main research areas

Write a research proposal

Your research proposal will be used to consider whether the proposed research is feasible and can be supervised by our staff members, so it is important that your theoretical and methodological preparation for it are clear.

We understand that it can be difficult to formulate research plans well in advance of carrying out the work, but we encourage you to articulate your ideas as clearly as possible. You should draft your proposal several times and, ideally, seek comments on it from other people (perhaps from your referees or former lecturers) before submitting it.

It is recommended that you contact your planned supervisor(s) well in advance of the deadline to identify a suitable topic for your research proposal.

You should then draft the research proposal independently and then discuss it with your planned supervisor(s), revising it based on their comments and suggestions.

Each PhD thesis contains several theoretical and empirical chapters. Your proposal should focus on the empirical work, laying out plans for at least two empirical studies (further plans can be worked out as you progress). Ideally, each of the studies should be a publishable journal article; students are strongly encouraged to publish their work in collaboration with their supervisors.

Your proposal must not exceed 1000 words; the panel may not read the part of your proposal exceeding the limit. This does not include references.

Your proposal should include:

• A title for the project
• A brief background for the planned research question(s)
• A compelling, brief rationale for the studies, including the specific research questions/hypotheses
• A description of the methodology for addressing these questions/hypotheses, which generally includes:
• Sufficiently large sample(s) of participants (allowing for appropriate statistical power) and measurement/experimental procedures
• If using existing data (e.g., data from large cohort studies or biobanks, imaging data sets, etc.), describe the data sets
• Your data analytical approach (e.g., suitable statistical models)
• If using qualitative data such as interviews, describe your methods and analytical approach
• Note that the methodology should be realistic, within the resources and time-scales available to you and your supervisor(s), and also allowing for necessary time for writing the thesis
• An indication of how your proposed work fits with and contributes to the research programme of your planned supervisor(s).

A PhD thesis typically means teamwork, involving the student and one or two supervisors, and often also other members of the research group(s) of the supervisor(s); a student receives training and help form the team, but can also contribute to the team with their research. Applicants who can show a good fit with a supervising team have an advantage.

We may ask for a brief (Zoom or MS Teams) interview with you if we have further questions.

If your application is successful, we expect that your research will develop. It is likely that your supervisor(s) or those reviewing the work will suggest changes or developments to your research as your studies progress.

Therefore, you will not be held to the ideas that you explain in your proposal during the course of your research.

• How to write a good PG research proposal

Contact potential supervisors prior to making an application

We strongly encourage you to get in touch with a potential supervisor, and to include their name in your application.

When contacting a potential supervisor, please include a draft proposal and CV as this will provide the starting point for discussion. You can introduce yourself by explaining why their work interests you.

Please note that our academic staff are very busy and it may take time for them to respond to your enquiry.

• View our staff profiles and contact details

Get ready to apply

In order to ensure full consideration of your application, we ask that you submit your complete application including all supporting documentation.

You will be asked to add contact details for your referees. We will email them with information on how to upload their reference directly to your online application. Please allow plenty of time as we can only consider your application once we have received your full application, including your references.

• Find out more about the application process

Consider your funding options

There are a number of funding opportunities both within the University and externally. Funding is highly competitive at PhD level.

• More information on funding

Pre-application Checklist

To receive a pre-arrival checklist to help you with your application, please email the PPLS Postgraduate Office at

• [email protected]

Please complete this checklist to keep track of your application preparations. Please submit the completed checklist as an additional document to your application.

Language Sciences at Edinburgh

Entry requirements.

These entry requirements are for the 2024/25 academic year and requirements for future academic years may differ. Entry requirements for the 2025/26 academic year will be published on 1 Oct 2024.

A UK 2:1 honours degree, or its international equivalent, in English language, linguistics, or a related subject.

Your academic achievements will be assessed by a panel of academics along with the research proposal submitted as part of your application.

(Revised 19 February 2024 to clarify entry requirements and assessment methods.)

International qualifications

Check whether your international qualifications meet our general entry requirements:

• Entry requirements by country
• English language requirements

Regardless of your nationality or country of residence, you must demonstrate a level of English language competency at a level that will enable you to succeed in your studies.

English language tests

We accept the following English language qualifications at the grades specified:

• IELTS Academic: total 7.0 with at least 6.5 in each component. We do not accept IELTS One Skill Retake to meet our English language requirements.
• TOEFL-iBT (including Home Edition): total 100 with at least 23 in each component. We do not accept TOEFL MyBest Score to meet our English language requirements.
• C1 Advanced ( CAE ) / C2 Proficiency ( CPE ): total 185 with at least 176 in each component.
• Trinity ISE : ISE III with passes in all four components.
• PTE Academic: total 70 with at least 62 in each component.

Your English language qualification must be no more than three and a half years old from the start date of the programme you are applying to study, unless you are using IELTS , TOEFL, Trinity ISE or PTE , in which case it must be no more than two years old.

Degrees taught and assessed in English

We also accept an undergraduate or postgraduate degree that has been taught and assessed in English in a majority English speaking country, as defined by UK Visas and Immigration:

• UKVI list of majority English speaking countries

We also accept a degree that has been taught and assessed in English from a university on our list of approved universities in non-majority English speaking countries (non-MESC).

• Approved universities in non-MESC

If you are not a national of a majority English speaking country, then your degree must be no more than five years old* at the beginning of your programme of study. (*Revised 05 March 2024 to extend degree validity to five years.)

Find out more about our language requirements:

• Fees and costs

Read our general information on tuition fees and studying costs:

Scholarships and funding

Only applications received by the Round 1 deadline will be considered for University of Edinburgh based funding.

You may be able to secure external funding outside of this deadline.

Featured funding

• Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities Funding
• Scottish Graduate School of Social Science Funding
• [College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Awards] ( https://www.ed.ac.uk/ppls/linguistics-and-english-language/prospective/postgraduate/funding-research-students/arts-humanities-soc-sci-research-awards )
• [Edinburgh Doctoral College Scholarships] ( https://www.ed.ac.uk/student-funding/postgraduate/international/other-funding/doctoral-college )

UK government postgraduate loans

If you live in the UK, you may be able to apply for a postgraduate loan from one of the UK’s governments.

The type and amount of financial support you are eligible for will depend on:

• your programme
• the duration of your studies
• your tuition fee status

Programmes studied on a part-time intermittent basis are not eligible.

• UK government and other external funding

Other funding opportunities

Search for scholarships and funding opportunities:

• Search for funding

Further information

• PPLS Postgraduate Office
• Phone: +44 (0)131 651 5002
• Contact: [email protected]
• Dugald Stewart Building
• 3 Charles Street
• Central Campus
• Programme: Linguistics and English Language
• School: Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences
• College: Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

This programme is not currently accepting applications. Applications for the next intake usually open in October.

Start date: September

Application deadlines

Only applications received by the Round 1 deadline will be considered for University of Edinburgh based funding. You may be able to secure external funding outside of this deadline.

We operate a gathered field approach to PhD applications.

This means that all complete applications which satisfy our minimum entry requirements will be held until the nearest deadline. The admissions panel will meet to consider all applications received together after that date.

Applications are held for processing over two deadlines:

• How to apply

Please read through the ‘Important application information’ section on this page before applying.

Find out more about the general application process for postgraduate programmes:

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Educational linguistics, doctor of philosophy (ph.d.), you are here, a pioneering doctoral program with an enduring legacy of research in applied linguistics, language learning, and teaching..

The Educational Linguistics Ph.D. program focuses on language learning and teaching as well as the role of language in education. Our questions and concerns are situated squarely in educational policy and practice, informing and informed by interdisciplinary theory and research in linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and other fields.

What Sets Us Apart

About the program.

Our program promotes the view that language must be examined within the cultural contexts and social situations in which it occurs.

3–4 courses per semester (fall/spring semesters only)

Transfer courses 8 (electives only)

Duration of program 5–7 years

Culminating experience Candidacy examination, and dissertation

Our faculty and students are involved in generating research on language and learning in areas such as:

• Linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of (additional) language development
• Local and global perspectives on world language teaching policy and practice in K-12 and higher education
• The intersections of disability, language, school–parent partnerships, and education policy
• The historical and contemporary manifestation of raciolinguistic ideologies that frame the language practices of racialized communities
• How multilingual speakers use milimodal communication practices – such as gestures, laughter, actions, and learning materials – to resolve miscommunication
• How language, social interaction, institutions, and the Internet influence what students learn in schools
• The role of lanugage in all forms of learning

Our curriculum is designed to provide a solid foundation in linguistics and research methodology. Students customize their education by working with their advisor to choose electives from a wide range of course offerings from across the Penn campus. Introductory courses in language pedagogy and sociolinguistics are strongly encouraged for students with no background in these areas. 

For course descriptions and requirements, visit the  Educational Linguistics Ph.D. program in the University Catalog .

For a full list of courses offered at GSE, visit  Penn’s University Course Catalog .

Sample courses

• Linguistics in Education                                                                              
• Sociolinguistics in Education                                                                      
• Language Diversity and Education                                                             
• Second Language Development    
• Genealogies of Race and Language in Educational Research 
• Issues in Second Language Acquisition                                        
• Phonology I
• Citizen Sociolinguistics
• Classroom Discourse and Interaction
• Approaches to Teaching English and Other Modern Languages
• Anthropology & Education
• Theories of Reading
• Language in Culture & Society

Our Faculty

"I got to work with inspiring scholars doing cutting-edge work. I saw firsthand the process of writing, submitting, and publishing a journal article. I had so many experiences that shaped me as a scholar and that I continue to draw on in my research and academic writing."

Our Graduates

The Educational Linguistics Ph.D. program prepares candidates for teaching and research careers in colleges and universities worldwide, as well as careers in government, community, and private organizations.

Alumni Careers

• Associate Professor, Columbia Teachers College
• Assistant Professor, Indiana University
• Associate Professor, Malmö University
• Associate Professor, University of Iowa
• Associate Professor and Chair, Adelphi University
• Director of Educational Programming and Research, Center for Cultural, Art, Training and Education (CCATE)
• Senior International Baccalaureate World Schools Manager
• Assistant Professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics in the English Department, Illinois State University
• Research and Evaluation Supervisor, William Penn School District
• Lecturer in Language Studies, Brown University
• Founder/CEO, Brilliant Bilingual
• Associate Professor of Language Education and Urban Social Justice Learning & Teaching, Rutgers University
• Associate Professor of Teaching and Learning, The Ohio State University
• Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne
• Assistant Professor of International Students, College of Charleston
• Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Louisville
• Assistant Professor, Culturally & Linguistically Diverse Education, University of Colorado, Denver
• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow

Admissions & Financial Aid

Please visit our Admissions and Financial Aid pages for specific information on the application requirements , as well as information on tuition, fees, financial aid, scholarships, and fellowships.

Contact us if you have any questions about the program.

Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 (215) 898-6415 [email protected] [email protected]

Erica Poinsett Program Assistant [email protected]

Please view information from our Admissions and Financial Aid Office for specific information on the cost of this program.

All Ph.D. students are guaranteed a full scholarship for their first four years of study, as well as a stipend and student health insurance. Penn GSE is committed to making your graduate education affordable, and we offer generous scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships.

Related News & Research

Zimmerman discusses divergent laws creating different curriculum in red and blue states in “Washington Post”

With Project SHARPE, Penn GSE’s Daché documents reparations in higher ed

Robert zemsky gives his vision for three-year college programs, sade bonilla gives her take on the evolution of career education.

Working Papers in Educational Linguistics

Working Papers in Educational Linguistics  is a student-managed journal focused on the many areas of research within educational linguistics.

You May Be Interested In

Related programs.

• Educational Linguistics Ed.D.
• Intercultural Communication M.S.Ed.
• Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) M.S.Ed.

Related Topics

• Department of Linguistics >
• Graduate >

PhD in Linguistics

Dawei Jin, presenting a conference paper (now an Assistant Professor Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)

The mission of the department’s PhD program is to train students to do research in linguistics and produce research that reflects the values and the mission of the department as a whole, to prepare them for academic jobs at teaching universities, liberal arts colleges, or major research universities and for jobs outside of academia. Our goal is to ensure that all of our students have at the end of their study an academic or industry position that requires a PhD in Linguistics. Our doctoral degree track focuses on breadth and empirical/experimental methodologies. Students receive training in traditional disciplines such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics and phonology, and they may also receive substantial training in other areas, such as language typology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and historical and contact linguistics. All of our students are required to take at least two semesters of Methods classes, which include courses in Field Methods, Quantitative Methods and Statistics, Corpus Linguistics and Computational Linguistics. Our students are also encouraged to explore interdisciplinary research within the UB Center for Cognitive Science , and many of our students receive extensive training in Cognitive Science through collaborations with the Psychology or Computer Science departments. 

PhD Funding

Join a community of scholars and researchers working together to solve pressing global problems. 

We are committed to recruiting the very best PhD students and preparing doctoral students for career success. UB features:

• World-class faculty experts  mentor PhD students in a dynamic research and learning environment. Students can focus on their research and scholarship alongside renowned faculty while preparing for the careers and professions that await them after graduation.
• A city on the rise.  Buffalo, N.Y. offers affordable housing, arts, culture and community. Learn more about Buffalo .

PhD Funding Opportunities

• Academic year stipends of $23,000  for all full-time, funded PhD students on 10-month academic teaching assistant, research assistant or graduate assistant appointments.
• UB’s stipend levels are competitive among public Association of American Universities (AAU) member institutions.
• Arthur A. Schomburg Fellowship Program : To be eligible for a Schomburg Fellowship, candidates must contribute to the diversity of the student body, and can demonstrate that they have overcome a disadvantage or other impediment to success in higher education. Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible to receive Schomburg Fellowships.
• Presidential Fellowships :  To be eligible for Presidential Fellowships, candidates must meet the criteria listed on the Presidential Fellowship page. Both domestic and international students are eligible, if they meet these criteria. For any questions regarding funding for academic year 2024–2025, contact the director of graduate studies or department chair.

Application Deadlines

December 15:  All PhD applicants wishing to be considered for financial support

March 1:  All other international PhD applicants

April 1:  All other domestic PhD applicants

Online Application

Degree requirements.

For most students with no transfer credits from other institutions, the categories in the table above should account for 48 of the 72 credits required for the Ph.D. The remaining 24 credits can be Independent Study, thesis/dissertation guidance or up to 12 credits from other UB departments. (Students in the Cognitive Science track and those earning a concurrent M.S. in Computational Linguistics may be permitted to take additional courses in other departments in consultation with the Director of Graduate Studies.)

*Students should consult the Director of Graduate Studies to determine which Methods courses are more appropriate given their intended specializations.

Areas of Specialization

PhD students are required to take four courses in their main specialty (including relevant core and methods courses), and are expected to choose their two methods courses in accordance with their specialization. Students need not choose their area of specialization early in their graduate career; faculty only expect that students take these four courses by the time they finish their course work (i.e., complete their 72 credit hours).

Students admitted to the PhD track who decide, during the first or second year, that they no longer wish to pursue a PhD, may instead complete the course requirements for the MA specialization and take the MA exam.

Specializations and Applicable Courses

This list of courses is intended only as a guideline, and additional classes may be added to these lists upon approval by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS). Please also note that some courses are more frequently taught than others. Students should contact the DGS to inquire about future course scheduling. 

*Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics are highly interdisciplinary and may involve substantial work in other departments.

Qualifying Paper

The qualifying paper (QP) is required of students who have been admitted to the Doctoral program in the Department of Linguistics. It must be completed before the student can pass on to Phase 2 of the program (i.e., the phase during which students conduct their PhD thesis research). The QP is intended to give the student experience in carrying out a research project that goes beyond what is normally required of a course paper; however the project certainly can evolve out of a course paper. The paper should have the format of a journal submission, and be between 9,000 and 12,000 words in length.

Early in their second year of graduate study, the student should choose a faculty member who will advise the student while he or she is working on the QP. (The faculty member may be, but does not have to be, the same faculty who will direct the student’s dissertation.) The role of the advisor is to guide the student as he or she is carrying out the research and the writing. The student, together with the advisor, select a second committee member (or “reader”), who will read and comment on the QP.

Once the QP has been approved by the advisor, the Director of Graduate Studies will assign a third committee member (or “reader”), and the other members of the QP committee will then read the QP and provide feedback or simply approve the paper if no additional revisions are necessary. When the committee has approved the QP, the three faculty sign the approval form. Students return the form to the Director of Graduate Study after all three faculty have signed the form, and (s)he will also sign it. Finally, the form is sent to the graduate secretary, so that (s)he can enter the information into our student database and file the form in the student’s file.

Students are required to make an oral presentation of their QP research at the end of their fifth semester (at the latest), and to finish their QP by the end of the sixth semester (at the latest). Upon completion of a student’s QP, the faculty as a whole will either determine whether (s)he should passed onto Phase 2 of the PhD program. In the event a student is not passed onto the P.D phase of the program, (s)he will earn a terminal MA and will leave the program.

Dissertation Proposal

The dissertation proposal is not intended to be a paper in the same sense as the QP. Rather, the dissertation proposal should be viewed as a very long abstract. It should include a statement of the topic (or hypothesis/claim); the context for the research (Why should other linguists be interested in the research? How does it fit into previous research?); the methodology and nature of the data or evidence that the student hopes to collect or find; and, perhaps, a preview of the conclusions the student hopes to present or the contribution the dissertation will make. Generally, the proposal should not be any longer than 20 pages; however the dissertation advisor ultimately determines the form of the proposal.

Dissertation Proposal Defense

The proposal defense is simply a meeting of the committee members and the student to ensure that everyone is clear about the nature of the topic, the scope of the research, and the methodology. Typically, no one “fails” a proposal defense, since the primary goal is to clarify and comment on the research before the research begins. The student should be aware, however, that the proposal defense may result in significant changes in the research plan.

Once the proposal defense has taken place, the committee members sign the form, the form is returned to the Director of Graduate Studies to sign, and finally the form is sent to the Assistant to the Chair.

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Linguistics (PhD)

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The doctor of philosophy (PhD) program in linguistics is individually tailored to meet the needs and professional goals of the student, drawing strong interdisciplinary support from related fields at the university. These fields may include—but are not limited to—anthropological linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and sciences, discourse and text analysis, English linguistics, first- and second-language acquisition, language-data processing, neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics.

Program Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this program, students will be able to:

• Conduct independent research and advance knowledge in area of specialization.
• Write technical papers that are of sufficiently high-quality to merit publication in scholarly journals.
• Demonstrate mastery in at least 2 core areas of linguistics sufficient to teach lower division courses in linguistics.
• Demonstrate mastery of current theory, literature, research methods, and data management in area of specialization sufficient to teach upper-division and graduate-level courses in linguistics.
• Demonstrate clear understanding of the principles of ethical research in area of specialization and adhere to these principles when conducting research.

Required Courses

The course work must be approved by the student's doctoral advisor. Even those students who have already earned an MA degree are typically expected to complete all of the MA degree course work requirements at Oregon as part of the normal progress toward the PhD.

For each student, the specific courses are to be determined by the student’s advisor and the department’s director of graduate studies, as are all other courses required for the PhD. No course with a grade lower than B– may be used to satisfy degree requirements. Candidates for the PhD must demonstrate proficiency equivalent to two years of college-level study of a second language and either proficiency equivalent to one year in a third research-related language or proficiency in programming or statistics in order to be advanced to candidacy.

Residency Requirement

The Division of Graduate Studies requires at least three years of full-time work beyond the bachelor’s degree for the doctorate, with at least one year spent in continuous residence on the Eugene campus. The Department of Linguistics interprets the latter requirement to mean that at least six courses, including seminars, must be taken in the program while the student is in continuous residence for three academic terms.

Doctoral Advisor

The department head appoints a doctoral advisor for each student upon admission to the PhD program.

Second-Year Review

By the end of a doctoral student’s second year,  he or she shall be given a review by the faculty members at a department meeting. Materials submitted by the student to the department for this review must include the following:

• A report that includes a research plan for the next year’s course work, potential topics for the two qualifying papers, a statement about the student’s career plans beyond the doctoral degree (and how the specific qualifying paper and thesis topics are relevant), and any other details worked out in consultation with the student’s advisor
• A curriculum vitae (CV)
• Written evidence of research progress and scholarly potential, such as a  substantive term paper or revision of a term paper that demonstrates excellence of original research or a linguistics master’s thesis; the materials must be submitted to the Department by April 15

Following review of these materials, the faculty members decides either to  accept  or  deny  the student for continued study in the PhD program. In some cases, a probation year may be granted for a student’s third year of study; the review process is repeated at the end of the third year with an  accept  outcome the only possibility for continued study.

As soon as possible after completion of the review, a letter to each graduate student under review is issued by the director of graduate studies informing the student of his or her status and, in the case of a one-year probation, specifying the conditions that must be met for a successful outcome during the additional third-year review. The language of the probation conditions is drafted by the student’s doctoral advisor and the director of graduate studies. The director may also meet with any students who are denied continued study or who are granted probation.

Annual review

Beginning in the third year of the program, each graduate student must submit an annual report and CV to his or her advisor by April 15 of each year. The report should be no more than one page in length and should detail what the student has accomplished over the past year in the program.

Doctoral Examination and Advancement to Candidacy

Requirements for the qualifying paper.

The doctoral examination consists of two original publishable papers (QPs) in different subfields of linguistics. The term “different subfields” may include two different methodological approaches to a single broad topic. Acceptance of a QP indicates that the review committee has deemed the paper to constitute sufficient evidence for the student’s readiness to perform PhD-level research and write a dissertation. Submission of both QPs for publication is required before the student can advance to candidacy. The publishing venue may be a refereed journal, a refereed or nonrefereed conference proceedings volume, an online publication, or another venue. While submission of each qualifying paper to a publishing venue is required for advancement to candidacy, acceptance for publication is not a requirement.

An unmodified MA thesis cannot serve as one of the qualifying papers. A qualifying paper may be, however, a publishable expansion or revision of an MA thesis or publishable term paper written for a course conducted by any faculty member in the department or, where deemed reasonable, for a course conducted by a faculty member outside the department. The paper may be written under the supervision of either the student’s advisor or another faculty member in consultation with the student’s advisor, who approves the topic and the final version before submission to the QP Coordinator.

Composition of the Qualifying Paper Committee

A committee of three faculty members is drawn up to review each qualifying paper. The committee is composed of two faculty member reviewers and the student’s doctoral advisor. In cases where the qualifying paper supervisor is not the student’s doctoral advisor, the doctoral advisor will be one of the two reviewers and the supervisor will be the third member of the committee. The advisor sits on both of an individual student’s committees, whereas at least one of the two faculty reviewers serves on only one of the two committees. One of the two faculty members on the committee may be from another department, where appropriate.  

Upon completion and documented submission to a publisher of both qualifying papers and completion of all required course work and the research language requirement, the student advances to candidacy for the PhD degree. The student and the department must electronically submit the advancement to candidacy to the Division of Graduate Studies for approval.

At least one of the QP reviewers must not be a co-author of the QP at the time of the QP’s submission to the committee. One QP reviewer may be a co-author of the QP as long as they have not contributed to the writing of the manuscript prior to its submission for review.

Qualifying Paper Coordinator and Reviewers

The qualifying paper coordinator is a member of the faculty who

• receives papers submitted by the graduate student (after approval of the qualifying paper by the student’s doctoral advisor and the QP supervisor)
• selects reviewers for the paper in consultation with the doctoral advisor and the QP supervisor
• sends the paper to the reviewers and sets a deadline for review (typically four weeks)
• receives the reviewers’ comments and decisions
• sends a summary of the comments and decisions, together with the reviewers’ specific comments, to the doctoral advisor and the student
• notifies the department when the qualifying paper is submitted and when it is accepted by the reviewers
• resolves disputes in cases of intractable disagreement among members of the QP committee

In the event that one or both of the reviewers requests revisions, the student (after the QP supervisor approves the revised version of the paper) submits the revision to the coordinator. A reviewer may choose whether or not to review the revised version. If a reviewer chooses to review the revision, the coordinator sends the revised version to the reviewer and sets a deadline for review (typically four weeks). Any further comments or revision requirements from the reviewer or reviewers are sent by the coordinator to the student, the QP supervisor and the student (with copies to the student’s doctoral advisor). In the event that both reviewers reject a qualifying paper, the student may submit a substitute paper with the approval of the doctoral advisor. Except by petition to the faculty and subsequent faculty approval, there may be no third submission of a qualifying paper.

Doctoral Dissertation

A doctoral committee must include at least three linguistics faculty members and one outside member, and must be either chaired or cochaired by the student’s doctoral advisor in linguistics. A dissertation prospectus must be submitted to and approved by the doctoral committee before the writing of the dissertation commences. The PhD will be granted upon completion of the preceding requirements, the writing of an original dissertation acceptable to the doctoral committee, and an oral examination on the dissertation.

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PhD in Linguistics

These are the new requirements implemented beginning in August 2019; for the old requirements, please click here .

A Brief Description of the PhD Program

The PhD program in Linguistics allows a high degree of flexibility and specialization, and is designed to encourage students to advance quickly to producing original research. Students may choose any of several standard areas of specialization, or design their own specialization with the help of their faculty advisor.

The PhD program in Linguistics consists of three stages, which correspond to the three Graduate College doctoral degree stages (see chapter 6 in the Graduate College Handbook ). The entire PhD program in Linguistics is intended to take 5 or 6 years: 2 years for Stage 1, and 3 or 4 years for Stages 2 and 3.

Stage 1 , which should be completed in two years, consists of 40 hours of graduate coursework, and the Stage 1 qualifying examination ; at the completion of Stage 1, students are eligible to receive a MA in Linguistics.

Stage 2 consists of 64 hours of graduate coursework, the Stage 2 qualifying examination , and the preliminary examination .

Stage 3 consists of the final defense and dissertation deposit.

Entry Requirements for the PhD Program

Students may be admitted to the PhD program in Linguistics with or without a prior master’s degree in linguistics or a related field. Depending on the student’s prior preparation, they may be admitted either into Stage 1 of the PhD or into Stage 2 of the PhD. Students who have completed a master’s degree in linguistics or a closely related field may be considered for admission to Stage 2 of the PhD program. Students without an approved prior master’s degree will only be considered for admission to Stage 1 of the PhD program. For admission to Stage 1 of the PhD program, undergraduate preparation should include the study of at least one foreign language; a course equivalent to LING 400 (Introduction to Linguistic Structure); and a broad background in the humanities, social sciences, and/or mathematics. 

Students admitted to Stage 1 must complete 40 credit hours in the areas listed below, maintain a GPA of 3.5 or better in all core courses, maintain a GPA of 3.0 or better overall, and earn a grade of High Pass on the Stage 1 qualifying examination in order to advance to Stage 2. Students who complete Stage 1 with a GPA of 3.0 or better overall, and who earn a grade of either Pass or High Pass on the Stage 1 qualifying examination, are eligible t o receive an MA in Linguistics.

Students who are admitted directly to Stage 2, but lack any of the core courses required for Stage 1, must complete Stage 1 requirements immediately on entry into the program; the courses will not count toward the 64 hours required for Stage 2 of the PhD.

How to Apply

Follow this link to information about applying to the PhD program; click here to start your graduate application.

Academic Advising

All students should choose a faculty member to serve as their academic advisor. New students are advised by the Director of Graduate Studies until a different advisor is chosen. Consult often with your advisor about course selection, research projects, publications, conference presentations, and any other academic issue. You may change advisors at any time. Once you reach the stage of writing your dissertation, your academic advisor serves as your Director of Dissertation Research. Typically (though not necessarily), your advisor also serves as chair of your Prelim Examination and Final Examination Committees. To select or change an advisor, fill out the electronic advisor agreement form . Your advisor should be a tenure-track or tenured faculty member at the University of Illinois.

PhD Program Requirements: Stage 1

40 graduate credit hours are required for Stage 1 of the PhD in Linguistics. Credit hours which have already been applied to another degree do not count toward this total; nor do preparatory courses taken as a condition on admission. It is normally possible to complete Stage 1 in two years. Note: core courses for Stage 1 are under bullets A and B below; all other courses are non-core courses.

A. The following courses are required (12 hours):

• LING 501: Syntax I
• LING 502: Phonology I
• LING 507: Formal Semantics I

B. Choose at least one course each from two of the following four areas (8 hours):

• LING 450: Sociolinguistics I
• LING 406: Intro to Computational Linguistics Note: LING 402 (Tools & Technology in Speech and Language Processing) needs to be taken as a pre-requisite to LING 406 for students without a computational background
• LING 425: Introduction to Psycholinguistics
• LING 426: Child and Adult Language Acquisition
• LING 489: Theoretical Foundations of SLA

C. Choose at least one course  in quantitative and/or qualitative research methods (4 hours):

• LING 403: Introduction to Field Methods
• LING 413: Corpus Linguistics
• LING 514: Design and Methodology in Linguistic Research
• LING 516: Field Methods
• A section of LING 490 on statistics or methodology for language research (subject to SEEC approval)
• A section of LING 591 on statistics or methodology for language research (subject to SEEC approval)
• A relevant course from another unit, such as Educational Psychology, Psychology, Anthropology, or Communications, with approval from the Student Examination and Evaluation Committee (SEEC); please click here to see a list of methods courses from other units that can satisfy the methods requirement.

D. Practicum and independent study are required (4 hours):

• LING 504: Practicum (2 hours)
• LING 590: Special Topics in Linguistics (2 hours)

E. Three elective courses are required (12 hours):

• These may be any LING courses at the 400-level or above, or non-LING courses approved by the student's advisor.

F. Language Requirement:

• For students who are native speakers of a language other than English, English satisfies this requirement.
• For students who are native speakers of English, demonstrated 4 th -level proficiency is required, which can be achieved by (a) completion of four semesters of college study (or four years of high school study), or equivalent, within 5 years of matriculation; or (b) corresponding placement on an Illinois foreign language placement test.
• Language courses can be taken Credit-No Credit (CR/NC) here at UIUC to satisfy the requirement. 

G. Stage 1 Qualifying Examination:

• Students first work closely with a faculty member to prepare an original research paper. The paper must be submitted to the department during the Spring semester of the student's second year (the deadline is set by the Student Examination and Evaluation Committee, and is usually the first day of the Spring semester), and the oral exam must take place before the end of the Spring semester.
• Qualifying papers must be supervised by a tenure-line faculty member with a non-zero appointment in Linguistics. For any questions about qualifying paper supervision, students should contact the Director of Graduate Studies.
• The examination itself consists of an oral presentation of the research paper before a committee of faculty members, who may ask questions concerning the research, the written paper, and the presentation.
• High Pass : the student is eligible to proceed to Stage 2 of the PhD, as well as to earn a MA in Linguistics , provided all other requirements are met.
• Pass: the student is NOT eligible to proceed to Stage 2 of the PhD, but the student IS eligible to earn a MA in Linguistics , provided all other requirements are met. The student has to leave the program with a terminal MA.
• Fail : the student is NOT eligible to proceed to Stage 2 of the PhD, and NOT eligible to earn a MA; the student is dismissed from the program with no degree.

H. Minimum GPA requirements

• Students must maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA across all courses, and a minimum 3.5 GPA across all core courses (listed under Point A and Point B above) in order to be eligible to proceed to Stage 2.
• Students who maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA across all courses are eligible to earn a MA in Linguistics , provided all other MA requirements are satisfied.

PhD Program Requirements: Stage 2

64 graduate credit hours are required for Stage 2 of the PhD in Linguistics. For students admitted directly to Stage 2 of the PhD, credit hours which have already been applied to another degree do not count toward this total; nor do preparatory courses taken as a condition on admission. The requirements below are in effect for all students entering the program in Fall Semester 2019 or later.

A. Choose at least one upper-level course in one of the following areas (4 hours):

• LING 541: Syntax II
• LING 581: Topics in Syntactic Theory
• relevant section of an advanced seminar or other course, with SEEC approval
• LING 542: Phonology II
• LING 520: Acoustic Phonetics
• LING 522: Articulatory Phonetics
• LING 582: Topics in Phonological Theory
• LING 547: Formal Semantics II
• LING 551: Pragmatics

B. Choose at least one upper-level course in one of the following areas (4 hours):

• LING 550 (Sociolinguistics II)
• LING 587 (Topics in Sociolinguistics)
• LING 506 (Topics in Computational Linguistics)
• LING 525 (Psycholinguistics)
• LING 529 (Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism)
• relevant section of LING 588 (Seminar in Second Language Learning)
• relevant section of LING 560 (Seminar in Bilingualism)
• LING 584 (Theories in Second Language Acquisition)
• relevant section of Ling 588 (Seminar in Second Language Learning)

C. Elective courses (12 hours)

• Students must complete at least 12 hours of graduate courses (400-level or higher) in Linguistics or related fields. These courses should reflect the student’s interests and professional goals, and should be selected in consultation with the advisor.

D. Research/Project/Independent Study Hours (12 hours)

• Students must complete at least 12 credit hours of LING 590: Special Topics in Linguistics, or of another independent research course approved by the advisor.

E. Language Requirement:

• Students must demonstrate knowledge of the structure of a language that is not their native tongue nor the same language that satisfied the foreign language requirement for Stage 1 of the PhD, or (in the case of students admitted directly to Stage 2) of the prior approved master's degree.
• This requirement may be satisfied through (a) 2 nd -level proficiency in the language, obtained through two semesters of college-level study, or equivalent; (b) 2 nd -level placement on an Illinois foreign language placement test; (c) completion of a course on the structure of the language; (d) completion of LING 516: Field Methods; or (e) a demonstration that the language is the focus of the student’s doctoral research.
• One of the languages with which the student is familiar (this may be the student’s native language, or the language used to satisfy one of the language requirements) must be a non-European or a non-Indo-European language.

F. Stage 2 Qualifying Examination:

• Students first work closely with a faculty member to prepare an original research paper. The paper may be in the same or a different area than the paper submitted for the Stage 1 qualifying examination , and it may be supervised by the same or a different faculty member. The Stage 2 paper must differ from the Stage 1 paper in terms of research topic, research questions, and/or research methods.
• For students who proceeded to Stage 2 from Stage 1, the Stage 2 paper must be submitted to the department during the Spring semester of the student's third year (the deadline is set by the Student Examination and Evaluation Committee, and is usually the first day of the Spring semester), and the oral exam must take place before the end of the Spring semester.
• For students who entered the program at Stage 2, the Stage 2 paper must be submitted to the department during the Spring semester of the student's second year (the deadline is set by the Student Examination and Evaluation Committee, and is usually the first day of the Spring semester), and the oral exam must take place before the end of the Spring semester.
• Pass : the student is eligible to proceed to the thesis proposal stage.
• Rewrite : the student is given a timeline to rewrite and resubmit the paper. Only one rewrite is permitted. The possible grades for a rewritten qualifying paper are Pass (proceed to the thesis proposal stage) or Fail (dismissal from the program).

G. Minimum GPA requirements

• Students must maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA in all courses in order to be eligible to proceed to Stage 3.

H. Thesis Hours Required (32 hours)

Students must complete at least 32 credit hours of LING 599: Thesis Research. Enrollment in LING 599 is not normally allowed before the semester in which the student expects to complete the Preliminary Examination.

I. Preliminary Examination

All students must pass the Preliminary Examination, normally in the fourth year of the PhD program for students who entered at Stage 1, or in the third year of the PhD program for students who entered directly into Stage 2.

• To take the Preliminary Examination, first finish all your course requirements. Work closely with your advisor to prepare a written dissertation proposal. Assemble your examination committee, bearing in mind the policies on committee membership set by the Graduate College (see https://grad.illinois.edu/exams-committees for more information). Submit your written proposal to your committee at least two weeks before the oral examination, which may be scheduled through the  Graduate Student Services Office  of the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics (please fill out the exam scheduling form ).
• The examination consists of an oral presentation of the dissertation proposal before the committee. The committee may ask questions about the proposed research, the written proposal, or the presentation.

PhD Program Requirements: Stage 3

Students complete all Stage 2 program requirements before proceedings to Stage 3.

A. Final Examination/Dissertation Defense

All students must write a dissertation and successfully defend its thesis in an oral examination. Familiarize yourself early in the process with the  Graduate College policies and procedures regarding dissertations .

• The Final Examination committee is normally (but not necessarily) identical to the Preliminary Examination committee. If it is different, please bear in mind the policies on committee membership set by the Graduate College; see https://grad.illinois.edu/exams-committees . Work closely with your advisor and other committee members to be sure the dissertation is satisfactory before arranging for the Final Examination. The completed dissertation must be submitted to the committee at least two weeks prior to the examination, which may be scheduled through the  Graduate Student Services Office  of the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics (please fill out the exam scheduling form ).
• The Final Examination consists of an oral presentation of the dissertation and defense of its thesis before the committee. The committee may ask questions about the research, the written dissertation, or the presentation.

B. Dissertation Deposit

Following successful completion the defense, make any revisions requested to the dissertation by the committee, and secure the approval of your advisor. Make sure the dissertation conforms to the  Graduate College formatting policies . Deposit the dissertation according to  the procedure set by the Graduate College .

Applying credit from other institutions

Students who enter the program with previous graduate work in Linguistics from another institution may petition to transfer course credit to the University of Illinois. Transfer of credit is not possible if the courses have already been counted towards a degree at any other institution. Transfer must be requested through the  SLCL Graduate Student Services office .

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Linguistics.

About the Program

The program emphasizes intellectual breadth and connections integrating many areas of Linguistics, as well as connections with neighboring disciplines.  

Faculty expertise in the department spans an unusually diverse range of endeavors. The graduate program accordingly includes a broad range of advanced coursework focusing on analyzing linguistic structure, variation and change, and cognition, using methods including archival research, field methods, experimental and corpus-based analyses, and computational modeling.

The Linguistics department has strong commitments to language documentation and reclamation, theoretical training and research, and the interdisciplinary study of language and cognition. Graduate students in the Linguistics department are eligible to apply to two Graduate Designated Emphases : the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization , and the  Designated Emphasis in Cognitive Science .

The department has an excellent record of placing graduates in professional careers in academia, in private industry (e.g. research and development, technology), and non-profit organizations.

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Applying for graduate admission.

Thank you for considering UC Berkeley for graduate study! UC Berkeley offers more than 120 graduate programs representing the breadth and depth of interdisciplinary scholarship. A complete list of graduate academic departments, degrees offered, and application deadlines can be found on the Graduate Division website .

Prospective students must submit an online application to be considered for admission, in addition to any supplemental materials specific to the program for which they are applying. The online application can be found on the Graduate Division website .

Admission Requirements

The minimum graduate admission requirements are:

A bachelor’s degree or recognized equivalent from an accredited institution;

A satisfactory scholastic average, usually a minimum grade-point average (GPA) of 3.0 (B) on a 4.0 scale; and

Enough undergraduate training to do graduate work in your chosen field.

For a list of requirements to complete your graduate application, please see the Graduate Division’s Admissions Requirements page . It is also important to check with the program or department of interest, as they may have additional requirements specific to their program of study and degree. Department contact information can be found here .

Where to apply?

Visit the Berkeley Graduate Division application page .

Departmental Requirements

In additional to the general materials required by the University we ask that you include:

Writing Sample : A writing sample is required of all applicants. Ideally, this sample would be a research paper on a linguistic topic, but it should in any event demonstrate the applicant's competence in writing analytic expository prose. The writing sample is to be submitted/uploaded with your online application.

For detailed information as to what we are looking for please go to our website at Linguistics .

Doctoral Degree Requirements

All students in the Department of Linguistics graduate program, including those holding a  Master’s degree from another institution, must earn a Berkeley MA in Linguistics en route to the  PhD.

Research training is part of the MA/PhD program from the start. As part of the MA phase of the program, students write an MA Capstone Paper. The MA Capstone Paper represents a piece of original research, undertaken with guidance from two faculty members. After the MA and before advancing to PhD candidacy, students write a PhD Qualifying Paper, with guidance from two additional faculty members. Throughout the program, students participate in professional activities, including research, writing, and presenting their work at conferences.

The usual timeline of program milestones, including both the MA and PhD portions is as follows:

Year 1: Research training and coursework.  This includes  LINGUIS 200 (Graduate Proseminar). Towards the end of the year, a required MA Capstone Planning Meeting with (at least) two faculty members launches students into working on their MA Capstone Paper.

Year 2: Continued training and coursework. Completion of MA Capstone Paper.

Year 3: LINGUIS 201 (Advanced Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics), PhD Qualifying Paper and Qualifying Exam . Advancement to PhD candidacy.

Year 4: Annotated Bibliography and Dissertation Prospectus + Prospectus Review, begin dissertation writing.

Year 5 (and 6):  Continue Dissertation Writing + Dissertation Committee Meetings

The MA Course Requirements

Students must complete a minimum of 24 semester units of graduate coursework in Linguistics, which include the Proseminar LINGUIS 200 , two Methods courses (any two of LINGUIS 240A , LINGUIS 240B , LINGUIS 260 Statistical Methods, or LINGUIS 252 Computational Modeling), and at least one course each from four of the five bins shown below.  

To find more specific information and details about our PhD, please review our Department website and the Grad Program Webpage .

LINGUIS 200 Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics 1 Unit

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022 Required of graduate students during first year in program. An introduction to linguistics as a profession, its history, subfields, and methodologies. Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics: Read More [+]

Hours & Format

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2 hours of seminar per week

Additional Format: Two hours of Seminar per week for 15 weeks.

Additional Details

Subject/Course Level: Linguistics/Graduate

Grading: Offered for satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade only.

Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 201 Advanced Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics 2 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022 The course is designed to help students become professional linguists by showing them how to write abstracts of papers, how to prepare papers for presentation at conferences, and how to prepare written versions of papers for submission as qualifying papers (and for journal publication), as well as to give students practical experience in the public presentation of their work. Advanced Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics: Read More [+]

Rules & Requirements

Prerequisites: M.A. requirements should be completed or instructor approval

Advanced Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 201A Second-Year Proseminar in Linguistics 1 Unit

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014 The goal of the course is to help second-year graduate students navigate the graduate program and develop professional skills. Second-Year Proseminar in Linguistics: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Second-year standing (or equivalent) in the Linguistics graduate program

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 1 hour of seminar per week

Additional Format: One hour of Seminar per week for 15 weeks.

Second-Year Proseminar in Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 201B Advanced Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics 2 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014 The course is designed to help students become professional linguists by showing them how to write abstracts of papers, how to prepare papers for presentation at conferences, and how to prepare written versions of papers for submission as qualifying papers (and for journal publication), as well as to give students practical experience in the public presentation of their work. Advanced Graduate Proseminar in Linguistics: Read More [+]

Credit Restrictions: Course must be taken at the beginning of graduate student's third year.

Formerly known as: Linguistics 201

LINGUIS 205 Advanced Cognitive Linguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2018 This will be an advanced course in cognitive linguistics. Among the topics covered will be cognitive bases for aspects of grammatical structure, cognitive constraints on language change and grammaticalization, and motivations for linguistic universals (i.e., constraints on variability). Advanced Cognitive Linguistics: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: 105. Graduate standing or consent of instructor

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week

Additional Format: Three hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks.

Grading: Letter grade.

Advanced Cognitive Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 208 Advanced Psycholinguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2019, Spring 2019 This is a graduate-level introduction to psycholinguistics. This course provides an overview of key questions and research findings in psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics focuses on the mechanisms underlying human language production and comprehension. Central to psycholinguistics is the formulation of conceptual and computational models of those mechanisms. Advanced Psycholinguistics: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Graduate standing in Linguistics or consent of the instructor

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of seminar per week

Additional Format: Three hours of seminar per week.

Instructors: Gahl, Johnson

Advanced Psycholinguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 210 Advanced Phonetics 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2020 A reading course focusing on theories of speech production, perception, and acoustics as they relate to phonetic and phonological patterns found in the languages of the world. Students write 5-8 "responses" to target articles, and the class as a whole reads background articles and books that place the target articles into their context. Advanced Phonetics: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Linguistics 110. Graduate standing or consent of instructor

Additional Format: Three hours of Seminar per week for 15 weeks.

Advanced Phonetics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 211A Advanced Phonology I 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023 Introduction to phonological theory at the graduate level with an emphasis on cross-linguistic phonological patterns. Advanced Phonology I: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Linguistics 111. Graduate standing or consent of instructor

Additional Format: Three hours of lecture per week.

Advanced Phonology I: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 211B Advanced Phonology II 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020 Continuation of 211A focusing on topics of current interest in phonological theory. Advanced Phonology II: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Linguistics 211A

Advanced Phonology II: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 213 Advanced Experimental Phonetics 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Spring 2016 The goal of this course is to provide graduate students with advanced practical training in experimental methods within phonetics. This is a rotating topics course. The specific techniques taught will depend on the instructor. Advanced Experimental Phonetics: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Graduate student status or consent of instructor

Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.

Instructors: Lin, Johnson

Advanced Experimental Phonetics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 215 Advanced Morphology 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2018, Fall 2015 Examination of complex morphological systems. Issues in the theory of word morphology. Advanced Morphology: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: 211A. Graduate standing or consent of instructor

Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit without restriction.

Advanced Morphology: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 220A Advanced Syntax I 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022 This course aims at developing a solid conceptual, analytical, and empirical foundation for doing research in syntax and semantics. The emphasis is on gaining familiarity with the central empirical phenomena, as well as core theoretical notions, methodology, and argumentation. Advanced Syntax I: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Graduate standing or consent of instructor

Advanced Syntax I: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 220B Advanced Syntax II 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 This course continues 220A with an in-depth examination of selected syntactic and semantic phenomena and the methods of their analysis. The phonomena investigated varies with each offering of the course. Advanced Syntax II: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Linguistics 220A

Advanced Syntax II: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 221 Advanced Formal Semantics I 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021 This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the core principles and empirical issues addressed by formal semantics and to familiarize them with the analytical tools involved in conducting research in this domain. The focus of this class is truth-conditional aspects of meaning and the compositional interpretation of phrases and sentences. Students will develop skills in semantic analysis and argumentation by focusing on semantic questions that arise in the analysis of a range of different phenomena, including quantification, the semantics of definite/indefinite descriptions, and relative clauses. Advanced Formal Semantics I: Read More [+]

Instructor: Deal

Advanced Formal Semantics I: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 221B Advanced Formal Semantics II 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2023 Students will continue to be introduced to various foundational issues and results in formal semantics. This course will provide a thorough introduction to intensionality as a phenomenon of natural language, as well as the core techniques and results of intensional (possible-world) semantics and the semantics of tense. In particular, we will examine in depth the semantics of sentential complements, the de re / de dicto distinction, modal auxiliaries, and tense and aspect morphemes. We will pay special attention to the ways that languages may vary with respect to these phenomena. Students will gain exposure to primary literature in the field of semantics through: key course readings, in-class presentations and final research project Advanced Formal Semantics II: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Linguistics 221 or permission of the instructor

Advanced Formal Semantics II: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 222 Advanced Linguistic Typology 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2021, Spring 2019 This course is a graduate level introduction to linguistic typology that covers quantitative, formal, and functional approaches to the typology of morphosyntactic and phonological phenomena. Students will be introduced to: 1) influential frameworks and tools for typological research including implicational hierarchies, semantic maps, and combinatorial typologies; 2) the status of universals in typology and formal, functional, and diachronic explanations for universals; 3) key topics in typology, including word order correlations and sampling methodology, grammatical relations typology, areal typology, and phonological typology. Advanced Linguistic Typology: Read More [+]

Instructors: Jenks, Michael

Advanced Linguistic Typology: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 225 Construction Grammar: The Relationship Between Thought and Language 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2015 Construction grammar arose in cognitive linguistics from phenomena showing how thought structures language and how language also structures thought, and from grammatical phenomena that could not be accounted for by transformational grammars. Over the past three decades two major theoretical approaches have evolved: One based on embodied cognition results, conceptual metaphor, and the neural modeling of brain mechanisms necessary to account for thought and language; and another theoretical approach that is disembodied, purely formal, and uses feature structures and head-driven grammars. The course will discuss these and other approaches. Construction Grammar: The Relationship Between Thought and Language: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Either Linguistics C105, C106, or 205. Or permission of instructor

Instructor: Lakoff

Construction Grammar: The Relationship Between Thought and Language: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 230 Advanced Comparative and Historical Linguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 The scholarly tradition of historical and comparative linguistics. Methods of reconstruction. Advanced Comparative and Historical Linguistics: Read More [+]

Advanced Comparative and Historical Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 234 Indo-European Linguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2013, Spring 2012 A survey of Indo-European (IE) linguistics, intended for general linguists interested in learning about the most fully developed sub-area of historical linguistics and for language-area specialists interested in how specific language areas relate to IE as a whole. All areas of the field will be surveyed (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics, cultural reconstruction, and subgrouping and diversification), with special emphasis on issues of broad current research interest. Indo-European Linguistics: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: An introductory historical linguistics course or a good knowledge of an older Indo-European language

Additional Format: Three hours of lecture/discussion per week.

Indo-European Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 240A Advanced Field Methods 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 Training in elicitation and analysis of linguistic data in a simulated field setting. The same language is used throughout the year. Linguistics 240B is the continuation of 240A. Advanced Field Methods: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Linguistics 211A and Linguistics 220A. Graduate standing or consent of instructor

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of session per week

Additional Format: Four hours of session per week.

Advanced Field Methods: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 240B Advanced Field Methods 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 Training in elicitation and analysis of linguistic data in a simulated field setting. The same language is used throughout the year. Linguistics 240B is the continuation of 240A. Advanced Field Methods: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Linguistics 240A

LINGUIS 243 Language, Computation, and Cognition 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the relation of language and cognition, through the lens of computation. We will explore universal aspects of cognition that underlie language, and the effect of one's native language on cognition. We will do this by: (1) reading a mixture of classic and recent papers on these issues,(2) replicating or extending computational analyses in those papers,(3) identifying interesting questions that are left open by the material covered, and (4) designing and conducting research to answer those open questions. Language, Computation, and Cognition: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Graduate students in linguistics or one of the other cognitive sciences or consent of instructor

Instructor: Regier

Formerly known as: Linguistics 290R

Language, Computation, and Cognition: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 245 Anthropological Linguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2010 Graduate level survey of anthropological linguistics which seeks to understand the role of culture in linguistic meaning, language use, and the development of linguistic form and, conversely, the role of linguistic form and structure in social action and in cultural practices. Anthropological Linguistics: Read More [+]

Instructor: Michael

Anthropological Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 250A Sociolinguistic Analysis: Variation 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2008 This series of courses is designed to give graduate students in linguistics and related fields advanced training in current theories and methods in sociolinguistics. The five courses (Variation; Language Contact; Language and Gender; Conversation/Discourse Analysis; Endangered Languages) represent five major foci of current sociolinguistic interest. Students will be exposed to historical overviews, readings, discussions, and demonstrations of methods and will be expected to do original field research, the results of which are to be presented orally and in a 15- to 25-page research paper. Sociolinguistic Analysis: Variation: Read More [+]

Instructor: Bleaman

Sociolinguistic Analysis: Variation: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 250B Sociolinguistic Analysis: Language Contact 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2018, Fall 2008 This series of courses is designed to give graduate students in linguistics and related fields advanced training in current theories and methods in sociolinguistics. The five courses (Variation; Language Contact; Language and Gender; Conversation/Discourse Analysis; Endangered Languages) represent five major foci of current sociolinguistic interest. Students will be exposed to historical overviews, readings, discussions, and demonstrations of methods and will be expected to do original field research, the results of which are to be presented orally and in a 15- to 25-page research paper. Sociolinguistic Analysis: Language Contact: Read More [+]

Instructors: R. Lakoff, Michael

Sociolinguistic Analysis: Language Contact: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 250C Sociolinguistic Analysis: Language and Gender 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2010, Spring 2009, Spring 2005 This series of courses is designed to give graduate students in linguistics and related fields advanced training in current theories and methods in sociolinguistics. The five courses (Variation; Language Contact; Language and Gender; Conversation/Discourse Analysis; Endangered Languages) represent five major foci of current sociolinguistic interest. Students will be exposed to historical overviews, readings, discussions, and demonstrations of methods and will be expected to do original field research, the results of which are to be presented orally and in a 15- to 25-page research paper. Sociolinguistic Analysis: Language and Gender: Read More [+]

Sociolinguistic Analysis: Language and Gender: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 250D Sociolinguistic Analysis: Conversation/Discourse Analysis 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2012, Fall 2009, Fall 2007 This series of courses is designed to give graduate students in linguistics and related fields advanced training in current theories and methods in sociolinguistics. The five courses (Variation; Language Contact; Language and Gender; Conversation/Discourse Analysis; Endangered Languages) represent five major foci of current sociolinguistic interest. Students will be exposed to historical overviews, readings, discussions, and demonstrations of methods and will be expected to do original field research, the results of which are to be presented orally and in a 15- to 25-page research paper. Sociolinguistic Analysis: Conversation/Discourse Analysis: Read More [+]

Sociolinguistic Analysis: Conversation/Discourse Analysis: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 250E Sociolinguistic Analysis: Endangered Languages 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2008 This series of courses is designed to give graduate students in linguistics and related fields advanced training in current theories and methods in sociolinguistics. The five courses (Variation; Language Contact; Language and Gender; Conversation/Discourse Analysis; Endangered Languages) represent five major foci of current sociolinguistic interest. Students will be exposed to historical overviews, readings, discussions, and demonstrations of methods and will be expected to do original field research, the results of which are to be presented orally and in a 15- to 25-page research paper. Sociolinguistic Analysis: Endangered Languages: Read More [+]

Sociolinguistic Analysis: Endangered Languages: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 251 Indigenous Language Revitalization: Contexts, Methods, Outcomes 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2020, Spring 2019 This course provides consistent engagement with indigenous languages, speakers, and texts. It gives an overview of historical and social contexts that produce language endangerment and loss; definitions and debates over terms and methods associated with language revitalization; ethical and methodological issues in language revitalization work; practical skills in language documentation and linguistic analysis; and case studies and outcomes in language revitalization. Indigenous Language Revitalization: Contexts, Methods, Outcomes: Read More [+]

Indigenous Language Revitalization: Contexts, Methods, Outcomes: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS C251A Indigenous Language Revitalization: Contexts, Methods, Outcomes 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2022 This is the core course for graduate students who intend to complete the interdisciplinary Designate Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization, and is open to non-DE graduate students as well. The course will provide consistent engagement with indigenous languages, speakers, and texts. The course will provide an overview of historical and social contexts that produce language endangerment and loss; definitions and debates over terms and methods associated with language revitalization; ethical and methodological issues in language revitalization work; practical skills in language documentation and linguistic analysis; and case studies and outcomes in language revitalization. Indigenous Language Revitalization: Contexts, Methods, Outcomes: Read More [+]

Instructor: Baquedano-Lopez

Also listed as: EDUC C251A

LINGUIS 252 COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021 This course provides a graduate-level introduction to computational linguistics. We will explore computational principles and methods that cross-cut different branches of linguistics, and will apply those principles to replicate and extend computational analyses in a selection of published papers. COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS: Read More [+]

Objectives & Outcomes

Student Learning Outcomes: Familiarity with computational principles and methods in linguistics, and experience in conducting computational analyses.

Prerequisites: The course is open to graduate students in linguistics or related disciplines. Access for other students is by permission of instructor. Some basic prior experience with programming is necessary, but no prior experience with computational linguistics is required. Starter code for homework assignments will be provided, giving students a basis on which to build further. Programming will be in Python

Instructor: REGIER

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 253 Language Contact 3 Units

Terms offered: Prior to 2007 This course is an introduction to the study of the linguistic and social phenomena that arise when speakers of different languages come in contact with one another, or when a community of speakers makes use of multiple languages. We will attend closely both to the grammatical dimensions of language contact processes and outcomes, and to the socio-historical and cultural conditions under which these processes take place. A major focus of the course will be to critically examine the notion that language contact gives rise to a set of clearly distinguishable language types (pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages), as well as the notion that each of these types arise under determinate socio-historical conditions. Language Contact: Read More [+]

Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for LINGUIS 253 after completing LINGUIS 253 . A deficient grade in LINGUIS 253 may be removed by taking LINGUIS 253 .

Language Contact: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 255 Advanced Sociolinguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 This course is a graduate-level introduction to the major theories and methodologies of sociolinguistics, which addresses the relationship between linguistic structure and the social and cultural contexts in which language is embedded. The course focuses on the variationist tradition but includes readings from allied areas (linguistic anthropology, the sociology of language, etc.). Advanced Sociolinguistics: Read More [+]

Advanced Sociolinguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 256 Advanced Sociolinguistics: Variation 3 Units

Terms offered: Prior to 2007 This course addresses the theoretical status and grammatical locus of sociolinguistic variation and develops practical research skills in the quantitative analysis of sociolinguistic variables. Advanced Sociolinguistics: Variation: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: LINGUIS 255 or permission of instructor (graduate standing)

Advanced Sociolinguistics: Variation: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 270 Structure of a Particular Language 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2018, Spring 2015 An analysis of the language structure of a particular language. The language investigated changes from year to year. Structure of a Particular Language: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: 211A and 220A

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of session per week

Additional Format: Three hours of Session per week for 15 weeks.

Structure of a Particular Language: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290A Topics in Linguistic Theory: Syntax 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2016, Spring 2016 Seminars or special lecture courses. Topics in Linguistic Theory: Syntax: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Consent of instructor

Topics in Linguistic Theory: Syntax: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290B Topics in Linguistic Theory: Semantics 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2015 Seminars or special lecture courses. Topics in Linguistic Theory: Semantics: Read More [+]

Topics in Linguistic Theory: Semantics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290D Topics in Linguistic Theory: Pragmatics 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Fall 2019 Seminars or special lecture courses. Topics in Linguistic Theory: Pragmatics: Read More [+]

Topics in Linguistic Theory: Pragmatics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290E Topics in Linguistic Theory: Phonology 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Spring 2017 Seminars or special lecture courses. Topics in Linguistic Theory: Phonology: Read More [+]

Topics in Linguistic Theory: Phonology: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290F Topics in Linguistic Theory: Diachronic Linguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Fall 2012, Fall 2010 Seminars or special lecture courses. Topics in Linguistic Theory: Diachronic Linguistics: Read More [+]

Topics in Linguistic Theory: Diachronic Linguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290H Topics in Linguistic Theory: Linguistic Reconstruction 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2011, Fall 1999, Fall 1998 Seminars or special lecture courses. Topics in Linguistic Theory: Linguistic Reconstruction: Read More [+]

Topics in Linguistic Theory: Linguistic Reconstruction: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290L Additional Seminar on Special Topics to Be Announced 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020 Seminar or special lecture courses on linguistic topics. Additional Seminar on Special Topics to Be Announced: Read More [+]

Additional Format: Hours to be arranged.

Additional Seminar on Special Topics to Be Announced: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 290M Topics in Linguistic Theory: Psycholinguistics 3 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2018 Seminars or special lecture courses. Topics in Linguistic Theory: Psycholinguistics: Read More [+]

Topics in Linguistic Theory: Psycholinguistics: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 297 Research Mentorship 1 - 2 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019 Mentor undergraduates in research on projects in the subfields of linguistics, sponsored by a faculty member; written report required. Research Mentorship: Read More [+]

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 1-2 hours of fieldwork per week

Additional Format: One to two hours of fieldwork per week.

Research Mentorship: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 298 Special Group Study 2 - 8 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023 Special Group Study: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: One full year of graduate study at Berkeley or consent of graduate adviser

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2-8 hours of seminar per week

Additional Format: Two to eight hours of seminar per week.

Special Group Study: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 299 Special Individual Study 2 - 12 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2014, Spring 2013 Special Individual Study: Read More [+]

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2-8 hours of independent study per week

Additional Format: Two to eight hours of independent study per week.

Special Individual Study: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 301 Teaching Practice and Instruction 2 or 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022 Course may be repeated for credit, but credit for the instructional training portion is to be given only once for each individual course taught by a T.A. For graduate students currently serving as T.A.s in the Department's undergraduate courses. Two units of credit are given for the teaching experience each time a student serving as T.A. enrolls in this course; two more units are given for teaching instruction, this taking the form of weekly consultations between instructors and their T.A.s. Teaching Practice and Instruction: Read More [+]

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2-4 hours of independent study per week

Subject/Course Level: Linguistics/Professional course for teachers or prospective teachers

Teaching Practice and Instruction: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 375 Training for Linguistics Teaching Assistants 2 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022 A teaching-methods "clinic" for first-time Linguistics GSI's. Sessions will deal with the presentation of linguistic concepts in each of the foundation courses, the creation of homework assignments and examination, policies and practices regarding correction of students' work, grading, and feedback. Training for Linguistics Teaching Assistants: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: 110, 120 and 130 or consent of instructor

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2 hours of independent study per week

Additional Format: Two 90-minute sections per week.

Formerly known as: Linguistics 302

Training for Linguistics Teaching Assistants: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 601 Individual Study for Master's Students 1 - 8 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Fall 2012 Individual study for the comprehensive or language requirements in consultation with the field adviser. Individual Study for Master's Students: Read More [+]

Credit Restrictions: Course does not satisfy unit or residence requirements for master's degree.

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 0 hours of independent study per week

Subject/Course Level: Linguistics/Graduate examination preparation

Individual Study for Master's Students: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 602 Individual Study for Doctoral Students 1 - 8 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Fall 2012 Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare themselves for the various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D. Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: One full year of graduate work at Berkeley or consent of graduate adviser

Credit Restrictions: Course does not satisfy unit or residence requirements for doctoral degree.

Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read Less [-]

LINGUIS 700 Colloquium 0.0 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019 Colloquium lecture presentations by Berkeley faculty and students, and invited visitors, on topics in language and linguistics. Department students and faculty offer feedback, suggestions, and critiques on work in progress. Colloquium: Read More [+]

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 0 hours of colloquium per week

Additional Format: Zero hour of colloquium per week.

Grading: The grading option will be decided by the instructor when the class is offered.

Formerly known as: Linguistics 999

Colloquium: Read Less [-]

Contact Information

Department of linguistics.

1203 Dwinelle Hall

Phone: 510-642-2757

[email protected]

Department Chair

Terry Regier, PhD

1221 Dwinelle Hall

[email protected]

Graduate Student Affairs Officer

Johnny Morales Arellano

1207 Dwinelle Hall

Phone: 510-643-7224

[email protected].

Head Graduate Advisor

Susanne Gahl

1220 Dwinelle Hall

[email protected]

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Ph.D. in Linguistics

Ph.d. in linguistics (general linguistics track) .

Note that the required courses and language requirement differ between the curriculum instituted Sept. 2018 and the prior curriculum. All other requirements are the same.

1A. Required courses (30 credits): Curriculum instituted Sept. 2018 

One graduate-level course in each of the following sub-disciplines:

• Syntax: LING 507 “Syntactic Theory I”
• Sociolinguistics: LING 532 “Sociolinguistics I”
• Language Processing and Development: LING 541 or 542 (“Language Processing and development I or II”)
• Phonology LING 552 (“Phonology II”)
• Phonetics LING 550 (“Introduction to Linguistic Phonetics”)
• Semantics LING 479 or 579 ("Semantic Theory I or II")

1B. Required courses (35 credits): Prior to Sept. 2018 

• LING 507 ("Syntax I")
• LING 508 ("Syntax II")
• LING 532 ("Sociolinguistics I")
• LING 551 ("Phonology I")
• LING 552 ("Phonology II")
• LING 550 or 553 ("Phonetics I or II")
• LING 578 or 579 ("Semantics I or II")

If a student has taken an equivalent course elsewhere, the requirement to take this course can be waived. The waiver needs to approved by the faculty in the relevant area and the GPC. Such waivers do not change the total number of credits required by the Graduate School for graduation.

2. Credits of study:

Additional courses for a minimum of 90 credits (27 of which are LING 800) to be determined by specialization and consultation with the advisory committee.

3A. Language knowledge requirement: Curriculum instituted Sept. 2018

General Linguistics Track students must satisfy one natural language requirement for the PhD. The choice of the language needs to be approved by the student’s advisory committee. The language requirement may be satisfied in one of the following three ways:

• One year of study at the university or community college level. Students who are language instructors in other UW departments can use their language teaching experience to satisfy one language requirement.
• A major research project that involves significant primary data collection that includes substantial structural analysis and results in a major paper such as a generals paper.

3B. Language knowledge requirement: Prior to   Sept. 2018

General Linguistics Track students must satisfy two natural language requirements for the PhD. Those may be satisfied in the following ways:

• Translation exam to demonstrate the ability to read linguistic literature in a foreign language; only one of the two language requirements for the PhD can be satisfied through the translation exam.

4. Colloquium conference talks:

Two papers delivered at a colloquium or conference.

5. Constitution of PhD committee:

By the end of the second year of study.

6. Generals Papers:

Two generals papers in different areas (normally 10cr LING 600). What counts as a different area is determined and needs to be approved by the student's committee.

7. General Examination:

An oral examination, in which the candidate is questioned on the two papers. The oral examination may not be scheduled until the committee has read the two papers and approved them as passing.

8. Dissertation Prospectus:

Within 6 months of the oral examination, the student will present a formal dissertation proposal to the subset of PhD committee members who constitute the reading committee, along with a proposed calendar for completion of the dissertation.

9. Final Exam:

A Final Exam on the dissertation attended by the candidate’s Supervisory Committee and open to others interested.

10. Dissertation:

A dissertation suitable for publication.

11. ABD (all but dissertation) requirement:

All degree requirements except for the dissertation and the two colloquia must be completed before the General Exam.

Ph.D. in Linguistics (Computational Linguistics Track)

The requirements for students on the computational linguistics track will meet all the same requirements as students in other specializations except :

1. Required courses:

• 2 syntax courses from among: LING 566, 507, 508
• 2 phonetics/phonology courses from among: LING 550, 551, 552, 553
• 1 semantics course from among: 578, 579
• 1 sociolinguistics course from among: LING 532, 533
• 3 Computational Linguistics courses from among: 567, 570, 571, 572, 573

3. Language knowledge requirement:

Students in Computational Linguistics must fulfill only one language requirement, but may not use a translation exam to do so. The language must be typologically substantially distinct from the student's native language; for example, a native English-speaking student would need to select a non-Indo-European language. Please refer to Language Requirements for details.

6. Generals papers:

Same as for the General Linguistics program except a Master’s thesis completed as part of the CLMS program may count as one of the two generals papers.

How to make the CLMS to PhD transition

M.A. in Linguistics

The M.A. is not required as a prerequisite to Ph.D. study.  Students enrolled in the PhD program may get an MA degree when they pass the general exam and file a request for an MA degree with the graduate school.  Students who have taken all the required courses for the PhD CompLing track may analogously file a request for an MS degree with the Graduate School, under either model A or B below. Students who would like to get an MS degree have to get their advisor's approval before filing an official request with the Graduate School.

A. Non-thesis model:

The Generals papers and Exam constitute the capstone project necessary for a master’s degree (or the student may complete the thesis model below).

B. Thesis model: 

• Required courses: Same as the required courses in PhD General Linguistics Track. 
• Language requirement: Same as the language requirement in PhD General Linguistics Track. 
• Thesis:  A thesis, written under the supervision of a Linguistics faculty member, and accepted by a second faculty reader. Normally the work is completed in 10 credits of LING 700.

Remarks on Graduate School Requirements

Students are advised to become familiar with Graduate School requirements, as well as those described on this website. If there are any questions, the student should contact the Graduate School, the Graduate Program Coordinator or the chair of the Supervisory Committee. Once admitted to the program, students should make it a regular practice to see the Graduate Program Coordinator about their progress at least once a year. All graduate students must be either registered or officially on leave. Failure to register or go on leave is interpreted as resignation from the Graduate School. Information on the Graduate School is available at http://www.grad.washington.edu . If you have any further questions or comments please contact us at [email protected]

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: a bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers.

• School of Foreign Languages, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

High citations most often characterize quality research that reflects the foci of the discipline. This study aims to spotlight the most recent hot topics and the trends looming from the highly cited papers (HCPs) in Web of Science category of linguistics and language & linguistics with bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric information of the 143 HCPs based on Essential Citation Indicators was retrieved and used to identify and analyze influential contributors at the levels of journals, authors, and countries. The most frequently explored topics were identified by corpus analysis and manual checking. The retrieved topics can be grouped into five general categories: multilingual-related , language teaching , and learning related , psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related , methods and tools-related , and others . Topics such as bi/multilingual(ism) , translanguaging , language/writing development , models , emotions , foreign language enjoyment (FLE) , cognition , anxiety are among the most frequently explored. Multilingual and positive trends are discerned from the investigated HCPs. The findings inform linguistic researchers of the publication characteristics of the HCPs in the linguistics field and help them pinpoint the research trends and directions to exert their efforts in future studies.

1. Introduction

Citations, as a rule, exhibit a skewed distributional pattern over the academic publications: a few papers accumulate an overwhelming large citations while the majority are rarely, if ever, cited. Correspondingly, the highly cited papers (HCPs) receive the greatest amount of attention in the academia as citations are commonly regarded as a strong indicator of research excellence. For academic professionals, following HCPs is an efficient way to stay current with the developments in a field and to make better informed decisions regarding potential research topics and directions to exert their efforts. For academic institutions, government and private agencies, and generally the science policy makers, they keep a close eye on and take advantage of this visible indicator, citations, to make more informed decisions on research funding allocation and science policy formulation. Under the backdrop of ever-growing academic outputs, there is noticeable attention shift from publication quantity to publication quality. Many countries are developing research policies to identify “excellent” universities, research groups, and researchers ( Danell, 2011 ). In a word, HCPs showcase high-quality research, encompass significant themes, and constitute a critical reference point in a research field as they are “gold bullion of science” ( Smith, 2007 ).

2. Literature review

Bibliometrics, a term coined by Pritchard (1969) , refers to the application of mathematical methods to the analysis of academic publications. Essentially this is a quantitative method to depict publication patterns within a given field based on a body of literature. There are many bibliometric studies on natural and social sciences in general ( Hsu and Ho, 2014 ; Zhu and Lei, 2022 ) and on various specific disciplines such as management sciences ( Liao et al., 2018 ), biomass research ( Chen and Ho, 2015 ), computer sciences ( Xie and Willett, 2013 ), and sport sciences ( Mancebo et al., 2013 ; Ríos et al., 2013 ), etc. In these studies, researchers tracked developments, weighed research impacts, and highlighted emerging scientific fronts with bibliometric methods. In the field of linguistics, bibliometric studies all occurred in the past few years ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ; Lei and Liao, 2017 ; Gong et al., 2018 ; Lei and Liu, 2018 , 2019 ). These bibliometric studies mostly examined a sub-area of linguistics, such as corpus linguistics ( Liao and Lei, 2017 ), translation studies ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ), the teaching of Chinese as a second/foreign language ( Gong et al., 2018 ), academic journals like System ( Lei and Liu, 2018 ) or Porta Linguarum ( Sabiote and Rodríguez, 2015 ), etc. Although Lei and Liu (2019) took the entire discipline of linguistics under investigation, their research is exclusively focused on applied linguistics and restricted in a limited number of journals (42 journals in total), leaving publications in other linguistics disciplines and qualified journals unexamined.

Over the recent years, a number of studies have been concerned with “excellent” papers or HCPs. For example, Small (2004) surveyed the HCPs authors’ opinions on why their papers are highly cited. The strong interest, the novelty, the utility, and the high importance of the work were among the most frequently mentioned. Most authors also considered that their selected HCPs are indeed based on their most important work in their academic career. Aksnes (2003) investigated the characteristics of HCPs and found that they were generally authored by a large number of scientists, often involving international collaboration. Some researchers even attempted to predict the HCPs by building mathematical models, implying “the first mover advantage in scientific publication” ( Newman, 2008 , 2014 ). In other words, papers published earlier in a field generally are more likely to accumulate more citations than those published later. Although many papers addressed HCPs from different perspectives, they held a common belief that HCPs are very different from less or zero cited papers and thus deserve utmost attention in academic research ( Aksnes, 2003 ; Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Yan et al., 2022 ).

Although an increased focus on research quality can be observed in different fields, opinions diverge on the range and the inclusion criterion of excellent papers. Are they ‘highly cited’, ‘top cited’, or ‘most frequently cited’ papers? Aksnes (2003) noted two different approaches to define a highly cited article, involving absolute or relative thresholds, respectively. An absolute threshold stipulates a minimum number of citations for identifying excellent papers while a relative threshold employs the percentile rank classes, for example, the top 10% most highly cited papers in a discipline or in a publication year or in a publication set. It is important to note that citations differ significantly in different fields and disciplines. A HCP in natural sciences generally accumulates more citations than its counterpart in social sciences. Thus, it is necessary to investigate HCPs from different fields separately or adopt different inclusion criterion to ensure a valid comparison.

The present study has been motivated by two considerations. First, the sizable number of publications of varied qualities in a scientific field makes it difficult or even impossible to conduct any reliable and effective literature research. Focusing on the quality publications, the HCPs in particular, might lend more credibility to the findings on trends. Second, HCPs can serve as a great platform to discover potentially important information for the development of a discipline and understand the past, present, and future of the scientific structure. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the hot topics and publication trends in the Web of Science category of linguistics or language & linguistics (shortened as linguistics in later references) with bibliometric methods. The study aims to answer the following three questions:

1. Who are the most productive and impactful contributors of the HCPs in WoS category of linguistics or language & linguistics in terms of publication venues, authors, and countries?

2. What are the most frequently explored topics in HCPs?

3. What are the general research trends revealed from the HCPs?

3. Materials and methods

Different from previous studies which used an arbitrary inclusion threshold (e.g., Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Hsu and Ho, 2014 ), we rely on Essential Science Indicator (ESI) to identify the HCPs. Developed by Clarivate, a leading company in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics, ESI reveals emerging science trends as well as influential individuals, institutions, papers, journals, and countries in any scientific fields of inquiry by drawing on the complete WoS databases. ESI has been chosen for the following three reasons. First, ESI adopts a stricter inclusion criterion for HCPs identification. That is, a paper is selected as a HCP only when its citations exceed the top 1% citation threshold in each of the 22 ESI subject categories. Second, ESI is widely used and recognized for its reliability and authority in identifying the top-charting work, generating “excellent” metrics including hot and highly cited papers. Third, ESI automatically updates its database to generate the most recent HCPs, especially suitable for trend studies for a specified timeframe.

3.1. Data source

The data retrieval was completed at the portal of our university library on June 20, 2022. The methods to retrieve the data are described in Table 1 . The bibliometric indicators regarding the important contributors at journal/author/country levels were obtained. Specifically, after the research was completed, we clicked the “Analyze Results” bar on the result page for the detailed descriptive analysis of the retrieved bibliometric data.

Table 1 . Retrieval strategies.

Several points should be noted about the search strategies. First, we searched the bibliometric data from two sub-databases of WoS core collection: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). There is no need to include the sub-database of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) because publications in the linguistics field are almost exclusively indexed in SSCI and A&HCI journals. WoS core collection was chosen as the data source because it boasts one of the most comprehensive and authoritative databases of bibliometric information in the world. Many previous studies utilized WoS to retrieve bibliometric data. van Oorschot et al. (2018) and Ruggeri et al. (2019) even indicated that WoS meets the highest standards in terms of impact factor and citation counts and hence guarantees the validity of any bibliometric analysis. Second, we do not restrict the document types as HCPs selection informed by ESI only considers articles and reviews. Third, we do not set the date range as the dataset of ESI-HCPs is automatically updated regularly to include the most recent 10 years of publications.

The aforementioned query obtained a total of 143 HCPs published in 48 journals contributed by 352 authors of 226 institutions. We then downloaded the raw bibliometric parameters of the 143 HCPs for follow-up analysis including publication years, authors, publication titles, countries, affiliations, abstracts, citation reports, etc. A complete list of the 143 HCPs can be found in the Supplementary Material . We collected the most recent impact factor (IF) of each journal from the 2022 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.1. citation analysis.

A citation threshold is the minimum number of citations obtained by ranking papers in a research field in descending order by citation counts and then selecting the top fraction or percentage of papers. In ESI, the highly cited threshold reveals the minimum number of citations received by the top 1% of papers from each of the 10 database years. In other words, a paper has to meet the minimum citation threshold that varies by research fields and by years to enter the HCP list. Of the 22 research fields in ESI, Social Science, General is a broad field covering a number of WoS categories including linguistics and language & linguistics . We checked the ESI official website to obtain the yearly highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Science , General as shown in Figure 1 ( https://esi.clarivate.com/ThresholdsAction.action ). As we can see, the longer a paper has been published, the more citations it has to receive to meet the threshold. We then divided the raw citation numbers of HCPs with the Highly Cited Thresholds in the corresponding year to obtain the normalized citations for each HCP.

Figure 1 . Highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Sciences, General.

3.2.2. Corpus analysis and manual checking

To determine the most frequently explored topics in these HCPs, we used both corpus-based analysis of word frequency and manual checking. Specifically, the more frequently a word or phrase occurs in a specifically designed corpus, the more likely it constitutes a research topic. In this study, we built an Abstract corpus with all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs, totaling 24,800 tokens. The procedures to retrieve the research topics in the Abstract corpus were as follows. First, the 143 pieces of abstracts were saved as separate.txt files in one folder. Second, AntConc ( Anthony, 2022 ), a corpus analysis tool for concordancing and text analysis, was employed to extract lists of n-grams (2–4) in decreasing order of frequency. We also generated a list of individual nouns because sometimes individual nouns can also constitute research topics. Considering our small corpus data, we adopted both frequency (3) and range criteria (3) for topic candidacy. That is, a candidate n-gram must occur at least 3 times and in at least 3 different abstract files. The frequency threshold guarantees the importance of the candidate topics while the range threshold guarantees that the topics are not overly crowded in a few number of publications. In this process, we actually tested the frequency and range thresholds several rounds for the inclusion of all the potential topics. In total, we obtained 531 nouns, 1,330 2-grams, 331 3-grams, and 81 4-grams. Third, because most of the retrieved n-grams cannot function as meaningful research topics, we manually checked all the candidate items and discussed extensively to decide their roles as potential research topics until full agreements were reached. Finally, we read all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. In the end, we got 118 topic items in total.

4.1. Main publication venues of HCPs

Of the 48 journals which published the 143 HCPs, 17 journals have contributed at least 3 HCPs ( Table 2 ), around 71.33% of the total examined HCPs (102/143), indicating that HCPs tend to be highly concentrated in a limited number of journals. The three largest publication outlets of HCPs are Bilingualism Language and Cognition (16), International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (11), and Modern Language Journal (10). Because each journal varies greatly in the number of papers published per year and the number of HCPs is associated with journal circulations, we divided the total number of papers (TP) in the examined years (2011–2021) with the number of the HCPs to acquire the HCP percentage for each journal (HCPs/TP). The three journals with the highest HCPs/TP percentage are Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2.26), Modern Language Journal (2.08), and Bilingualism Language and Cognition (1.74), indicating that papers published in these journals have a higher probability to enter the HCPs list.

Table 2 . Top 17 publication venues of HCPs.

In terms of the general impact of the HCPs from each journal, we divided the number of HCPs with their total citations (TC) to obtain the average citations for each HCP (TC/HCP). The three journals with the highest TC/HCP are Journal of Memory and Language (837.86), Computational Linguistics (533.75), and Journal of Pragmatics (303.75). It indicates that even in the same WoS category, HCPs in different journals have strikingly different capability to accumulate citations. For example, the TC/HCP in System is as low as 31.73, which is even less than 4% of the highest TC/HCP in Journal of Memory and Language .

In regards to the latest journal impact factor (IF) in 2022, the top four journals with the highest IF are Computational Linguistics (7.778) , Modern Language Journal (7.5), Computer Assisted Language Learning (5.964), and Language Learning (5.24). According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quantile rankings in WoS category of linguistics , all the journals on the list belong to the Q 1 (the top 25%), indicating that contributors are more likely to be attracted to contribute and cite papers in these prestigious high impact journals.

4.2. Authors of HCPs

A total of 352 authors had their names listed in the 143 HCPs, of whom 33 authors appeared in at least 2 HCPs as shown in Table 3 . We also provided in Table 3 other indicators to evaluate the authors’ productivity and impact including the total number of citations (TC), the number of citations per HCP, and the number of First author or Corresponding author HCPs (FA/CA). The reason we include the FA/CA indicator is that first authors and corresponding authors are usually considered to contribute the most and should receive greater proportion of credit in academic publications ( Marui et al., 2004 ; Dance, 2012 ).

Table 3 . Authors with at least 2 HCPs.

In terms of the number of HCPs, Dewaele JM from Birkbeck Univ London tops the list with 7 HCPs with total citations of 492 (TC = 492), followed by Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol (#HCPs = 5; TC = 215) and Saito K from UCL (#HCPs = 5; TC = 576). It is to be noted that both Li C and Saito K have close academic collaborations with Dewaele JM . For example, 3 of the 5 HCPs by Li C are co-authored with Dewaele JM . The topics in their co-authored HCPs are mostly about foreign language learning emotions such as boredom , anxiety , enjoyment , the measurement , and positive psychology .

In regards to TC, Li, W . from UCL stands out as the most influential scholar among all the listed authors with total citations of 956 from 2 HCPs, followed by Norton B from Univ British Columbia (TC = 915) and Vasishth S from Univ Potsdam (TC = 694). The average citations per HCP from them are also the highest among the listed authors (478, 305, 347, respectively). It is important to note that Li, W.’ s 2 HCPs are his groundbreaking works on translanguaging which almost become must-reads for anyone who engages in translanguaging research ( Li, 2011 , 2018 ). Besides, Li, W. single authors his 2 HCPs, which is extremely rare as HCPs are often the results from multiple researchers. Norton B ’s HCPs are exploring some core issues in applied linguistics such as identity and investment , language learning , and social change that are considered the foundational work in its field ( Norton and Toohey, 2011 ; Darvin and Norton, 2015 ).

From the perspective of FA/CA papers, Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci and Technol is prominent because she is the first author of all her 5 HCPs. Her research on language learning emotions in the Chinese context is gaining widespread recognition ( Li et al., 2018 , 2019 , 2021 ; Li, 2019 , 2021 ). However, as a newly emerging researcher, most of her HCPs are published in the very recent years and hence accumulate relatively fewer citations (TC = 215). Mondada L from Univ Basel follows closely and single authors her 3 HCPs. Her work is mostly devoted to conversation analysis , multimodality , and social interaction ( Mondada, 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ).

We need to mention the following points regarding the productive authors of HCPs. First, when we calculated the number of HCPs from each author, only the papers published in the journals indexed in the investigated WoS categories were taken in account ( linguistics; language & linguistics ), which came as a compromise to protect the linguistics oriented nature of the HCPs. For example, Brysbaert M from Ghent University claimed a total of 8 HCPs at the time of the data retrieval, of which 6 HCPs were published in WoS category of psychology and more psychologically oriented, hence not included in our study. Besides, all the authors on the author list were treated equally when we calculated the number of HCPs, disregarding the author ordering. That implies that some influential authors may not be able to enter the list as their publications are comparatively fewer. Second, as some authors reported different affiliations at their different career stages, we only provide their most recent affiliation for convenience. Third, it is highly competitive to have one’s work selected as HCPs. The fact that a majority of the HCPs authors do not appear in our productive author list does not diminish their great contributions to this field. The rankings in Table 3 does not necessarily reflect the recognition authors have earned in academia at large.

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

In total, the 143 HCPs originated from 33 countries. The most productive countries that contributed at least three HCPs are listed in Table 4 . The USA took an overwhelming lead with 59 HCPs, followed distantly by England with 31 HCPs. They also boasted the highest total citations (TC = 15,770; TC = 9,840), manifesting their high productivity and strong influence as traditional powerhouses in linguistics research. In regards to the average citations per HCP, Germany , England and the USA were the top three countries (TC/HCP = 281.67, 281.14, and 267.29, respectively). Although China held the third position with 19 HCPs published, its TC/HCP is the third from the bottom (TC/HCP = 66.84). One of the important reasons is that 13 out of the 19 HCPs contributed by scholars in China are published in the year of 2020 or 2021. The newly published HCPs may need more time to accumulate citations. Besides, 18 out of the 19 HCPs in China are first author and/or corresponding authors, indicating that scholars in China are becoming more independent and gaining more voice in English linguistics research.

Table 4 . Top 18 countries with at least 3 HCPs.

Two points should be noted here as to the productive countries. First, we calculated the HCP contributions from the country level instead of the region level. In other words, HCP contributions from different regions of the same country will be combined in the calculation. For example, HCPs from Scotland were added to the HCPs from England . HCPs from Hong Kong , Macau , and Taiwan are put together with the HCPs from Mainland China . In this way, a clear picture of the HCPs on the country level can be painted. Second, we manually checked the address information of the first author and corresponding author for each HCP. There are some cases where the first author or the corresponding author may report affiliations from more than one country. In this case, every country in their address list will be treated equally in the FA/CA calculation. In other word, a HCP may be classified into more than one country because of the different country backgrounds of the first and/or the corresponding author.

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

The top 20 HCPs with the highest normed citations are listed in decreasing order in Table 5 . The top cited publications can guide us to better understand the development and research topics in recent years.

Table 5 . Top 20 HCPs.

By reading the titles and the abstracts of these top HCPs, we categorized the topics of the 20 HCPs into the following five groups: (i) statistical and analytical methods in (psycho)linguistics such as sentimental analysis, sentence simplification techniques, effect sizes, linear mixed models (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14), (ii) language learning/teaching emotions such enjoyment, anxiety, boredom, stress (#11, 15, 16, 18, 19), (iii) translanguaging or multilinguilism (#5, 13, 20, 17), (iv) language perception (#2, 7, 10), (v) medium of instruction (#8, 12). It is no surprise that 6 out of the top 20 HCPs are about statistical methods in linguistics because language researchers aspire to employ statistics to make their research more scientific. Besides, we noticed that the papers on language teaching/learning emotions on the list are all published in the year of 2020 and 2021, indicating that these emerging topics may deserve more attention in future research. We also noticed two Covid-19 related articles (#16, 19) explored the emotions teachers and students experience during the pandemic, a timely response to the urgent need of the language learning and teaching community.

It is of special interest to note that papers from the journals indexed in multiple JCR categories seem to accumulate more citations. For example, Journal of Memory and Language , American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology , and Computational Linguistics are indexed both in SSCI and SCIE and contribute the top 4 HCPs, manifesting the advantage of these hybrid journals in amassing citations compared to the conventional language journals. Besides, different to findings from Yan et al. (2022) that most of the top HCPs in the field of radiology are reviews in document types, 19 out of the top 20 HCPs are research articles instead of reviews except Macaro et al. (2018) .

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

After obtaining the corpus based topic items, we read all the titles and abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. Table 6 presents the top research topics with the observed frequency of 5 or above. We grouped these topics into five broad categories: bilingual-related, language learning/teaching-related, psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related, methods and tools-related, and others . The observed frequency count for each topic in the abstract corpus were included in the brackets. We found that about 34 of the 143 HCPs are exploring bilingual related issues, the largest share among all the categorized topics, testifying its academic popularity in the examined timespan. Besides, 30 of the 143 HCPs are investigating language learning/teaching-related issues, with topics ranging from learners (e.g., EFL learners, individual difference) to multiple learning variables (e.g., learning strategy, motivation, agency). The findings here will be validated by the analysis of the keywords.

Table 6 . Categorization of the most explored research topics.

Several points should be mentioned regarding the topic candidacy. First, for similar topic expressions, we used a cover term and added the frequency counts. For example, multilingualism is a cover term for bilinguals, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and multilingualism . Second, for nouns of singular and plural forms (e.g., emotion and emotions ) or for items with different spellings (e.g., meta analysis and meta analyses ), we combined the frequency counts. Third, we found that some longer items (3 grams and 4 grams) could be subsumed to short ones (2 grams or monogram) without loss of essential meaning (e.g., working memory from working memory capacity ). In this case, the shorter ones were kept for their higher frequency. Fourth, some highly frequent terms were discarded because they were too general to be valuable topics in language research, for example, applied linguistics , language use , second language .

5. Discussion and implications

Based on 143 highly cited papers collected from the WoS categories of linguistics , the present study attempts to present a bird’s eye view of the publication landscape and the most updated research themes reflected from the HCPs in the linguistics field. Specifically, we investigated the important contributors of HCPs in terms of journals, authors and countries. Besides, we spotlighted the research topics by corpus-based analysis of the abstracts and a detailed analysis of the top HCPs. The study has produced several findings that bear important implications.

The first finding is that the HCPs are highly concentrated in a limited journals and countries. In regards to journals, those in the spheres of bilingualism and applied linguistics (e.g., language teaching and learning) are likely to accumulate more citations and hence to produce more HCPs. Journals that focus on bilingualism from a linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific perspective are the most frequent outlets of HCPs as evidenced by the top two productive journals of HCPs, Bilingualism Language and Cognition and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism . This can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of bilingual-related research and the development of cognitive measurement techniques. The merits of analyzing publication venues of HCPs are two folds. One the one hand, it can point out which sources of high-quality publications in this field can be inquired for readers as most of the significant and cutting-edge achievements are concentrated in these prestigious journals. On the other hand, it also provides essential guidance or channels for authors or contributors to submit their works for higher visibility.

In terms of country distributions, the traditional powerhouses in linguistics research such as the USA and England are undoubtedly leading the HCP publications in both the number and the citations of the HCPs. However, developing countries are also becoming increasing prominent such as China and Iran , which could be traceable in the funding and support of national language policies and development policies as reported in recent studies ( Ping et al., 2009 ; Lei and Liu, 2019 ). Take China as an example. Along with economic development, China has given more impetus to academic outputs with increased investment in scientific research ( Lei and Liao, 2017 ). Therefore, researchers in China are highly motivated to publish papers in high-quality journals to win recognition in international academia and to deal with the publish or perish pressure ( Lee, 2014 ). These factors may explain the rise of China as a new emerging research powerhouse in both natural and social sciences, including English linguistics research.

The second finding is the multilingual trend in linguistics research. The dominant clustering of topics regarding multilingualism can be understood as a timely response to the multilingual research fever ( May, 2014 ). 34 out of the 143 HCPs have such words as bilingualism, bilingual, multilingualism , translanguaging , etc., in their titles, reflecting a strong multilingual tendency of the HCPs. Multilingual-related HCPs mainly involve three aspects: multilingualism from the perspectives of psycholinguistics and cognition (e.g., Luk et al., 2011 ; Leivada et al., 2020 ); multilingual teaching (e.g., Schissel et al., 2018 ; Ortega, 2019 ; Archila et al., 2021 ); language policies related to multilingualism (e.g., Shen and Gao, 2018 ). As a pedagogical process initially used to describe the bilingual classroom practice and also a frequently explored topic in HCPs, translanguaging is developed into an applied linguistics theory since Li’s Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language ( Li, 2018 ). The most common collocates of translanguaging in the Abstract corpus are pedagogy/pedagogies, practices, space/spaces . There are two main reasons for this multilingual turn. First, the rapid development of globalization, immigration, and overseas study programs greatly stimulate the use and research of multiple languages in different linguistic contexts. Second, in many non-English countries, courses are delivered through languages (mostly English) besides their mother tongue ( Clark, 2017 ). Students are required to use multiple languages as resources to learn and understand subjects and ideas. The burgeoning body of English Medium Instruction literature in higher education is in line with the rising interest in multilingualism. Due to the innate multidisciplinary nature, it is to be expected that, multilingualism, the topic du jour, is bound to attract more attention in the future.

The third finding is the application of Positive Psychology (PP) in second language acquisition (SLA), that is, the positive trend in linguistic research. In our analysis, 20 out of 143 HCPs have words or phrases such as emotions, enjoyment, boredom, anxiety , and positive psychology in their titles, which might signal a shift of interest in the psychology of language learners and teachers in different linguistic environments. Our study shows Foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is the most frequently explored emotion, followed by foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). In fact, the topics of PP are not entirely new to SLA. For example, studies of language motivations, affections, and good language learners all provide roots for the emergence of PP in SLA ( Naiman, 1978 ; Gardner, 2010 ). In recent years, both research and teaching applications of PP in SLA are building rapidly, with a diversity of topics already being explored such as positive education and PP interventions. It is to be noted that SLA also feeds back on PP theories and concepts besides drawing inspirations from it, which makes it “an area rich for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas” ( Macintyre et al., 2019 ).

It should be noted that subjectivity is involved when we decide and categorize the candidate topic items based on the Abstract corpus. However, the frequency and range criteria guarantee that these items are actually more explored in multiple HCPs, thus indicating topic values for further investigation. Some high frequent n-grams are abandoned because they are too general or not meaningful topics. For example, applied linguistics is too broad to be included as most of the HCPs concern issues in this research line instead of theoretical linguistics. By meaningful topics, we mean that the topics can help journal editors and readers quickly locate their interested fields ( Lei and Liu, 2019 ), as the author keywords such as bilingualism , emotions , and individual differences . The examination of the few 3/4-grams and monograms (mostly nouns) revealed that most of them were either not meaningful topics or they could be subsumed in the 2-grams. Besides, there is inevitably some overlapping in the topic categorizations. For example, some topics in the language teaching and learning category are situated and discussed within the context of multilingualism. The merits of topic categorizations are two folds: to better monitor the overlapping between the Abstract corpus-based topic items and the keywords; to roughly delineate the research strands in the HCPs for future research.

It should also be noted that all the results were based on the retrieved HCPs only. The study did not aim to paint a comprehensive and full picture of the whole landscape of linguistic research. Rather, it specifically focused on the most popular literature in a specified timeframe, thus generating the snapshots or trends in linguistic research. One of the important merits of this methodology is that some newly emerging but highly cited researchers can be spotlighted and gain more academic attention because only the metrics of HCPs are considered in calculation. On the contrary, the exclusion of some other highly cited researchers in general such as Rod Ellis and Ken Hyland just indicates that their highly cited publications are not within our investigated timeframe and cannot be interpreted as their diminishing academic influence in the field. Besides, the study does not consider the issue of collaborators or collaborations in calculating the number of HCPs for two reasons. First, although some researchers are regular collaborators such as Li CC and Dewaele JM, their individual contribution can never be undermined. Second, the study also provides additional information about the number of the FA/CA HCPs from each listed author, which may aid readers in locating their interested research.

We acknowledge that our study has some limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our study focuses on the HCPs extracted from WoS SSCI and A&HCI journals, the alleged most celebrated papers in this field. Future studies may consider including data from other databases such as Scopus to verify the findings of the present study. Second, our Abstract corpus-based method for topic extraction involved human judgement. Although the final list was the result of several rounds of discussions among the authors, it is difficult or even impossible to avoid subjectivity and some worthy topics may be unconsciously missed. Therefore, future research may consider employing automatic algorithms to extract topics. For example, a dependency-based machine learning approach can be used to identify research topics ( Zhu and Lei, 2021 ).

Data availability statement

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/ supplementary material .

Author contributions

SY: conceptualization and methodology. SY and LZ: writing-review and editing and writing-original draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund of China MOE under the grant 20YJC740076 and 18YJC740141.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: bibliometric analysis, linguistics, highly cited papers, corpus analysis, research trends

Citation: Yan S and Zhang L (2023) Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers. Front. Psychol . 13:1052586. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586

Received: 24 September 2022; Accepted: 23 December 2022; Published: 11 January 2023.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2023 Yan and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Le Zhang, ✉ [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Guide to Graduate Study

Introduction.

Welcome to Linguistics at Cornell!

Matriculation through the graduate program in Linguistics requires the understanding of procedural guidelines and subsequent academic requirements such as exams, Teaching Assistantships, fellowship opportunities and program requirements. Here we have provided department-specific information and documents you will need throughout your course of study along with graduate school requirements and policies.

This guide has been prepared for the use of students and faculty in the Graduate Field of Linguistics at Cornell University and should be read in conjunction with the Code of Legislation of the Graduate Faculty , which sets forth the policies governing advanced degree programs throughout the University. Graduate study at Cornell requires each student to work out a program of study in consultation with a Special Committee selected by the student from the membership of the Graduate Faculty. This process takes the place of uniform course requirements and uniform departmental examinations. It is intended to create a close working relationship between faculty and students and to encourage freedom and flexibility in the design of individual students’ degree programs. Such a system places special demands on the energy and adaptability of both faculty and students, and it requires of each student a high degree of initiative and responsibility.

Student’s Responsibility

It is the responsibility of the candidate to become familiar with the various regulations that apply to their program and to satisfy them in the proper way. For the Ph.D. degree program there are three requirements imposed by the Graduate School: registration units; examinations; and the dissertation or thesis.

• Register for each semester, including the summer term, in one of the following status categories: full-time, part-time, in absentia, leave of absence, or withdrawal (full details of these status categories may be found in section V “Registration” of the Code of Legislation of the Graduate Faculty and in the Guide to Graduate Study).
• Familiarize themselves with Graduate School and University regulations, as published in the Code of Legislation of the Graduate Faculty, the Guide to Graduate Study, and University Policy 1.3: Graduate Assistantships: TA Policy
• Stay in regular communication with their special committee. Graduate students are expected to schedule a meeting of their full committee at least once a year. 
• Ensure they are in compliance with research regulations, especially those established by the Institutional Review Board for Human Participants and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

If you are struggling to meet any of the responsibilities above, please first see your committee chair or other members of your special committee. If that is not possible, for whatever reason, please see the DGS. If neither of these is an option, please approach the department chair. Also know that the Graduate Field Assistant is available to lead you to resources on campus.

PhD Progress Checklist

Students entering 2018 and later are required to give a colloquium-length presentation in the department at some point during their time at Cornell.

• Make significant inroads on completing the core courses
• Have at least two meetings (one per semester) with your Advisory Committee
• Apply for an NSF or other national fellowship in the fall semester, if eligible (usually only US citizens and resident aliens are eligible).
• File academic plan with Graduate School describing anticipated summer academic activities and outcomes (due May 1, required for summer funding).
• Select a Special Committee for your Q-Paper by September 1st
• Submit a Q-paper proposal to your Special Committee by December 1st
• Continue taking core courses, seminars
• Complete any ancillary skills courses your committee requires (if any)
• Take Research Workshop (LING 6603) in spring
• The Q-Exam should be attempted before the end of the 4th semester. Summer funding for the second summer will be contingent on having attempted the Q-Exam by this deadline. To qualify for summer funding at the end of the fourth semester, it is essential that you schedule your Q-Exam no later than May 1st, and that the date of the exam be no later than May 14th.
• Select a Special Committee for your A-Paper by September 1st
• Register for Directed Research in the fall semester
• Submit an A-paper proposal to your Special Committee by December 1st
• Take Research Workshop (LING 6604) in spring semester
• Take seminars to further research goals
• Schedule A-Exam (form: Schedule A Examination and Research Compliance Form
• Take A-Exam (report results - Results for Admission to Candidacy (A Exam) , eligibility for 3rd summer funding is contingent on passing A-exam or filing a scheduling form by May 1 indicating an intention to take the exam by the start of the 7th semester)

N.B. The dissertation-year fellowship will be available only to students who attempted their A-exam prior to the seventh semester of enrollment (a requirement of the Code of Legislation), and have passed the A-exam. In addition, students seeking the dissertation-year fellowship must have written and submitted an external fellowship or grant proposal within their first four years of enrollment, to encourage all students to pursue external funding. (In exceptional cases for which there may be no logical external funding organization to which it would be appropriate to write a proposal, the student may write a proposal for an internal Cornell award such as a Graduate School or Einaudi travel grant or may petition for permission to complete an alternative professionalization activity.)

• A-exam should be done by the beginning of the 7th semester!
• Select Special Committee for your dissertation by September 1st
• Write your dissertation proposal (prospectus)
• Take P-exam (defense of prospectus) by end of fall semester, committee reports results to GFA
• Work on dissertation
• Apply for dissertation year fellowships (usually done in fall) and other post-A-exam funding (such as East Asia Program fellowships)
• 4th year summer funding is available by application only; students who have not passed their A-exam are not eligible. Applications for summer funding are due May 1 at the Graduate School. Students who have not passed their P-Exam are also ineligible for 4th year summer funding. Exams not completed by May 1st will result in funding being withheld.
• Apply for jobs, postdocs, etc.
• Finish dissertation
• Schedule B-Exam (form: Schedule B Examination )
• Take B-exam (defense of dissertation, report results - Results for Final Defense of Ph.D. Degree (B Exam) )
• File Thesis, using ProQuest

Advisory and Special Committee

During the first year in the program, students plan their schedules in consultation with an Advisory Committee.  This temporary arrangement is intended to give students time to get to know members of the faculty before selecting their own Special Committee.  After a general orientation, new students meet with their advisory committee members before the beginning of the fall and spring semesters to plan their course schedules. The Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) will serve as the student’s main academic Provisional Chair during the first year of residence.

Beyond the first year Special Committees guide the student. At all points, the chair of the current Special Committee is regarded as the student’s advisor. At the beginning of the 3rd semester the student selects a Special Committee to guide in the writing of the Q-Exam paper. At the end of the third semester (by December 1st), 2nd year students should submit a Q-paper proposal to the committee. This paper is defended at the end of the 2nd year. At the beginning of the 3rd year, the Special Committee (and chair) for the A-exam paper is selected, and a proposal for the A-paper is required by December 1st. The paper is defended at the end of the 3rd year. Finally, at beginning of the 4th year, the chair and committee for the dissertation is selected. The dissertation prospectus must be defended by the end of the fall semester of the 4th year. The dissertation is defended at the B-Exam. The A-Exam and the B-Exam require scheduling and result forms to be filed with the Graduate School, the Q-Exam and P-Exam forms are filed department-internally only. 

Questions involving academic matters should be addressed to members of a student’s committee. One mistake many students make is consulting too narrowly – remember to involve all the members of your committee, not just your chair! Other faculty members may be useful resources as well.

Questions involving financial aid or Field and Graduate School policy should be addressed either to the Field Assistant or to the Director of Graduate Studies.  

PhD Requirements

The Ph.D. in Linguistics is awarded to students who have demonstrated the ability to conduct independent, original research in the field, and have acquired mastery of linguistic concepts, methods and data. Progress towards the degree is attained by:  (1) completing the core course requirements (2) passing the Qualifying Exam (Q-Exam), results reported to Field (3) passing the Admission to Candidacy Exam (A-Exam), results reported to Grad School ( Results for Admission to Candidacy (A Exam) ) (4) defending the prospectus (P-Exam), results reported to Field (5) completing and defending dissertation (B-Exam), results reported to Grad School ( Results for Final Defense of Ph.D. Degree (B Exam) )

Course Requirements

A. Core Courses

To assure that Ph.D. students receive an adequate grounding in all of the fundamental areas of linguistics, the field has defined a set of core requirements in the areas of Syntax, Phonology, Semantics, and Historical Linguistics. The general expectation is that all students will take all core courses. If a student requests an exemption on the basis of comparable graduate-level coursework at another institution, this exemption can only be granted after consultation with the Director of Graduate Studies and the instructor of the relevant course. Beyond the core courses, Ph.D. students are expected to attend advanced linguistics courses (topics courses and seminars) not only in the areas in which they write their research papers and thesis, but in areas that will provide sufficient breadth as advised by the Special Committee.

Students are required to complete courses equivalent to the following:

• Historical Linguistics (LING 6314)
• Phonology I and II (LING 6401/6402)
• Syntax I and II (LING 6403/6404)
• Semantics I (LING 6421)
• Research Workshop (LING 6603/6604): This course provides students with an opportunity to develop an original research paper through a number of revisions (the Q and A papers are the main focus of attention, in their respective semesters), some of which are presented to an audience of fellow students. The final version is presented at a semester-end mini-conference.
• At least one course from the following subfields:  computational linguistics, historical linguistics (beyond Ling 6314), morphology, phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. 
•  Advanced courses: all students are required to take at least four (4) seminars or topics courses for credit. These are courses at the 6600-level or higher.

B. Ancillary skill sets

In the course of research, a student may need to master one or more ancillary skill sets. These might be familiarity with languages of scholarship, or training in statistics, logic, field methods or programming. The student, in consultation with his/her committee, is expected to determine which skills need to be acquired and how and when this should be done.

Additional Course Information

A regular course load for students without teaching appointments is four courses.  Students who are teaching normally take three courses. TAs (pre-A-exam) who fall below 12 credits in their course registration should “top-up” their credits by registering for Directed Research.  Students may exceptionally take more courses, if deemed appropriate by the Special Committee.  Aside from the Research Workshop, which is offered only as an S/U course, linguistics courses should be taken under the letter grade option . After the A-Exam, additional courses may not be taken for credit (unless required by your committee or fellowship), however, auditing courses is encouraged.

All full-time graduate students are required to be registered for at least 12 credits. All students must register on-line through the student center on-line system, Student Center .  Under no circumstances may a student drop below the 12 credit threshold and still be considered full-time .  Pre-A students will be enrolled in GRAD 9010 – Graduate-level Research and Post-A will be enrolled in GRAD 9011 – Doctoral Dissertation Research to meet the 12 credit requirement.

Incompletes for core courses are granted only in exceptional circumstances, and the incomplete must be made up by the beginning of the next semester. This deadline should be taken seriously. After one year, a grade of Incomplete becomes permanently frozen by the Graduate School. Q and A exams cannot be scheduled with any Incompletes still outstanding. 

A list of courses in linguistics and related information will be posted on the department bulletin board (by the lounge) and for each semester or you may look at the on-line course roster or courses of study Courses of Study .  Many of the advanced courses in the department take the form of one-time-only Linguistics seminars. It is also possible for students to arrange for independent study courses (Directed Research LING 7701-7702) on topics of mutual interest with faculty members. Any additions to your course schedule after the three week add period or seven week drop period requires a course enrollment petition ( General Petition ).

Department/CLC Colloquia

Students are expected to participate in the intellectual life of the department. Students are strongly urged to attend talks given by visiting and in-house speakers, and to participate in workshops and conferences organized by the department members.  Please check our website for updates, http://linguistics.cornell.edu .

Student Progress Review

At the end of the academic year, every graduate student is required to complete a student progress review to reflect on the progress made throughout the last year and goals for the upcoming year. The Special Committee chairperson is responsible for evaluating the student’s progress and approving the report.

Time to Degree

Doctoral degree candidates must complete six semesters before the degree is granted. Normally Ph.D. degree candidates take four to five years of full-time study to complete all degree requirements. All requirements for the doctoral degree must be completed within seven years of the first registration in the degree program; an extension may be obtained by petition. At least one-half of the minimum registration units for a master’s or Ph.D. degree must be earned from full-time, academic-year study on the Ithaca campus.

The Faculty in the Field of Linguistics have set up some guidelines for the submission of papers and dissertations for Q, A, P and B exams. These deadlines are to ensure that committees have time to read the materials and that students are not asked to revise up to the last minute. Deviations from these guidelines can, of course, be negotiated with the Special Committee when necessary.

Q and A-Exams:

• 3 weeks before exam date: papers should be submitted to committee
• 2 weeks before exam date: questions will be given to the student
• 1 week before the exam date: written answers to the questions are due

Admission to candidacy in the field of Linguistics consists of writing two research papers, which are evaluated in two exams, the Q-exam and the A-exam. The Q-exam is taken by the end of the second year, and the A-exam is taken by the end of the third year. The “academic year” in each of these cases does not include summer or winter breaks. While exams are sometimes scheduled during summer, the availability of committee members during breaks is highly variable, and you should not assume that you will have this time for exams. Graduate School regulations require that all doctoral students must take the Examination for Admission to Candidacy before beginning their seventh semester of registration unless special permission is obtained from the Dean.   

The format of the Q and A exams varies from case to case, depending on the expectations of the Special Committee. The Field requires that the candidate submit to the committee in advance of the exam a research paper of high quality (see the deadlines above). The Special Committee for each exam will normally ask the candidate to prepare written answers to one to two questions. The papers for the two exams must be in two distinct subfields, with a distinct Special Committee devoted to each paper. Committees are considered distinct if they have different chairs. Questions concerning distinctness of committees should be addressed to the DGS.

Students should consult with members of their Special Committees well in advance of the examination date about the specific expectations. The Q-Exam is scheduled department internally using the Q-exam scheduling form (available from the GFA or the DGS), and the results are reported to the GFA on the results form. The Q-Exam should be attempted by the end of the 4th semester. Summer funding for the second summer will be contingent on having attempted the Q-Exam by this deadline. To qualify for summer funding at the end of the fourth semester, it is essential that you schedule your Q-Exam no later than May 1st, and that the date of the exam be no later than May 14th.

Scheduling of the A-Exam must be done through the Graduate School. You will need to file the schedule of exam ( Schedule A Examination and Research Compliance Form ) with the graduate school at least seven days prior to taking your exam. This form must be signed by all members of the student’s Special Committee, the DGS and the GFA. Please plan ahead to acquire the proper signatures. Please begin the online results of examination form the morning of your exam ( Results for Admission to Candidacy (A Exam) ). The A-exam must be attempted by the start of the 7th semester. Summer funding and the second year of Sage fellowship are contingent on meeting this deadline.

Outcomes of exams (Q or A) may be as follows:

• Pass with revisions (minor or substantial, but no need to retake the exam)
• Fail and reschedule (with a clear and firm deadline specified for the retake)

Your committee will clearly communicate to you and the DGS the result.

Candidates who pass the A-Exam may be awarded an M.A. without thesis at that time. This is not automatic. The required box must be checked and initialed by the DGS on the results form.

Following successful completion of the A-exam, a Special Committee for the dissertation is selected and the P-exam (defense of the prospectus) is undertaken by the end of the fall of the fourth year. Scheduling of this exam is done department-internally (with the GFA/DGS) and does not involve the Graduate School.

P-Exam submission guideline:

• 2 weeks before the exam date the prospectus should be given to the committee
• Results of the exam are reported to the GFA

The B-Exam (thesis defense) is taken after completion of the Ph.D. dissertation. The B-Exam includes a presentation of the highlights of the dissertation followed by questions from the committee and others in attendance. You will also need to file the schedule of exam form to take your B-exam.

B-Exam submission guideline:

• 1 month before exam date: defensible draft should be given to the committee, AND a meeting with the committee (either actual or virtual) should be held.

Please check on-line for filing deadlines to submit your dissertation. Cornell has three conferral dates: January, May, and August, https://gradschool.cornell.edu/academic-progress/thesis-dissertation/

Candidates submit their dissertation to The Graduate School online using the Proquest tool.  The Graduate School verifies that minimum formatting requirements are met and sends an electronic copy of the thesis document to the candidate's special committee for final approval.

Faculty Participation in Exams

All members of the special committee are expected to attend all examinations. At the discretion of the field demonstrated by permission from the DGS and with the agreement of all members of the committee when scheduling an exam, one or more committee members may participate from a remote off-campus location via appropriate, high-quality electronic audio and video conferencing. At least one committee member must be located on the University campus with the student during the exam.  

If the chair is participating in the exam from a remote location, they must designate one of the minor members with signature authority (not an ad hoc member) in attendance on campus to sign the Results of Examination Form on their behalf.* The special committee chair must inform the student, the Director of Graduate Studies of the student’s field, and the Graduate School of the arrangements.

While faculty may be available for exams during the summer, do not assume that they will be available. Scheduling of exams should be worked out well in advance, so that you can take into account the schedules of all your committee members.

*Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, rules surrounding in-person exams has been adjusted. Please check with your Committee and the GFA if you have questions about how your exam should be presented. The B-Exam Results Form is now initiated by the student following the exam in an online format.

Faculty Signatures

It is your responsibility to stay in contact with your chair and members to make sure you get their signatures on the necessary forms before they go on leave or away for the summer. They scan the necessary forms to the department or GFA.

Certification of Enrollment and Degree

The Office of the University Registrar is responsible for certifying student enrollment and degrees. The University Registrar maintains both past and present student records, but cannot verify future enrollment. https://certification.cornell.edu/

Ordering Transcripts

The Office of the University Registrar provides official grade transcripts bearing the Cornell University seal and the signature of the University Registrar for graduate and professional school applications, employers, and scholarships. The University maintains a single transcript for all students reflecting all courses taken at Cornell, including summer, extramural, undergraduate and graduate courses.

If you wish to see your grades, you can view and print them by semester through Student Center .  Log-in:  http://studentcenter.cornell.edu

Financial Support

We typically offer guaranteed 5-year full financial support to students we admit into the graduate program, regardless of the student's citizenship. Two of those years (SAGE Fellowship:  the first-year and the "dissertation year" in which students are not expected to work as a Teaching Assistant or Research Assistant) are through fellowships, and the other three years are through other sources of support, typically teaching assistantships or research assistantships. The five-year funding package covers: tuition and fees, student health insurance, and a nine-month stipend for living expenses. Funding is contingent on satisfactory academic performance, and beginning with the 2014-15 academic year, the Graduate School has instituted progress requirements for continued funding. These are outlined in the Ph.D. Progress Checklist above, and detailed below:

• Students will be eligible for the first and second summers of funding only if they file with the Graduate School by May 1 of that year an academic plan describing the anticipated summer academic activities and outcomes. A form will be developed by the Graduate School for this purpose.
• To be eligible for second summer funding, a student must have assembled the Special Committee before the end of the third semester of registration , as required by the Code of Legislation (and must file an academic plan by May 1 as above).
• Students will be eligible for third-summer funding only if they have passed the A-exam or have filed an exam scheduling form by May 1 of that year that indicates they are scheduled to attempt the A-exam prior to the start of their seventh semester of enrollment , as required by the Code of Legislation , and if they have filed with the Graduate School by May 1 an academic plan describing anticipated summer academic activities and outcomes.
• Students will be eligible for fourth-summer funding only after passing the A-exam, and only by application . A student must submit an application to the Graduate School for 4th summer of support by May 1 of that year, describing the scholarly work completed with the 3rd summer of support and stating the academic objectives to be undertaken during the 4th summer. Graduate School staff will review the applications. Students who have not passed their P-Exam are also ineligible for 4th year summer funding. Exams not completed by May 1st will result in funding being withheld.
• The dissertation-year fellowship will be available only to students who attempted their A-exam prior to the seventh semester of enrollment (a requirement of the Code of Legislation ), and have passed the A-exam. In addition, students seeking the dissertation-year fellowship must have written and submitted an external fellowship or grant proposal within their first four years of enrollment , to encourage all students to pursue external funding. (In exceptional cases for which there may be no logical external funding organization to which it would be appropriate to write a proposal, the student may write a proposal for an internal Cornell award such as a Graduate School or Einaudi travel grant or may petition for permission to complete an alternative professionalization activity.)
• No portion of the dissertation-year fellowship may be used by the student later than the twelfth semester of enrollment, unless the student had secured external funding in an earlier term, in which case one or two semesters of dissertation-year fellowship may be used after the twelfth semester corresponding with the length of external funding (one semester if one semester external funding had been secured, or two semesters if at least two semesters of external funding had been secured). Exceptions to this requirement will be considered on an individual basis and requests should be directed to the Graduate School Associate Dean for Administration ( General Petition ).

Teaching/Research Assistantships

The studies of all graduate students are funded in part by Teaching Assistantships (TA). In the Department of Linguistics, most Teaching Assistantships involve helping a professor in an undergraduate course; responsibilities may include leading discussion sections, meeting with students, grading homeworks, and helping grade papers and exams. Every effort is made to match teaching assignments with graduate student interests and to make sure that each Teaching Assistant receives a variety of teaching experiences while at Cornell. Teaching assistants work on average 15 hours per week and do not usually exceed 20 hours in any given week.

A student holding a TAship may work a total of 20 hours per week as a combination of the TA responsibilities and employment elsewhere, either on- or off-campus.  Students holding a University fellowship, external fellowship, or GRA may also be employed on- or off-campus for no more than 8 hours per week, as long as this does not conflict with the terms of the external funding agreement.

A research assistantship (RA) entails work on a faculty research project not necessarily related to the student's dissertation. RAs work 15 to 20 hours per week. If the research project directly relates to the student's dissertation, then the appointment is a graduate research assistantship (GRA), in which case the time spent on research connected with the project is expected to be significant; hours spent on assignments are not tracked.

The John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines  allots the Linguistics department TA-ships for our graduate students to teach First-Year Writing Seminars. This program emphasizes the humanities and social sciences and provides graduate students in all fields the opportunity to lead small undergraduate writing seminars. All graduate student instructors of First-Year Writing Seminars are required to take Writing 7100: Teaching Writing, a summer or fall semester one-credit course that provides a thorough pedagogical and experiential grounding in teaching. The Department of Linguistics has approved courses that are offered as a writing seminar. See Jenny for the list of seminars. Students who have taught an FWS before may submit a proposal for a new FWS, preferably in consultation with a faculty FWS supervisor. If you would like to propose a new writing seminar, you will need to fill out the pre-EPC form. See Jenny for the form. The Buttrick-Crippen Fellowship provides a full year of support during which the Fellow can devote him- or herself to the study and practice of teaching composition within and beyond the context of his or her discipline.  The Buttrick-Crippen Fellow will spend the fall semester preparing a new First-Year Writing Seminar for the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines and will teach that seminar in the spring.

Students may serve as language instructors for their TA-ship.  These also involve 15 hours a week.  Students with appropriate language background who are given such assignments are required to fulfill the respective department’s training requirements, which may include taking a course in language pedagogy.

Cornell University Policy 1.3: Graduate Student Assistantships

Fellowships

The Graduate Field now requires all graduate students to apply for external funding at some point in their first four years. Students in the field of Linguistics are encouraged to apply for a variety of fellowships such as the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council Fellowships. Also, the area programs at Cornell (East Asian, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and European Studies) offer federally supported Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to students whose research focuses on any of these areas.

Many of these non-Cornell sourced external fellowships are intended for students who are citizens or permanent residents of the United States. Applicants from foreign countries should seek aid from their own governments, universities, or corporations or from a U.S. agency operating abroad, such as the Institute for International Education or the Fulbright-Hays Program.

Under certain conditions, external funds can be used to extend the package of guaranteed support from the Field or used in place of the teaching assistantship or research apprenticeship to allow the recipient to focus on research. The Graduate School and Field policies on modifying the initial package are available from the Director of Graduate Studies. Currently, students who are awarded these fellowships receive the two "free" years of SAGE funding (i.e., the first year and the dissertation year), but not the University-funded RA or TA stipends in the years that are covered by the external fellowship.

The East Asian Program offers the following fellowships that have no citizenship restrictions. These typically provide tuition and stipend for one semester.

Einaudi Center Funding-East Asia Program Fellowships

• Robert J. Smith Fellowships in Japanese Studies
• Starr Fellowships
• Lee Teng-hui Fellowships in World Affairs

Einaudi Center grants :

Cornell's Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS), Fulbright-Hayes Awards, Fulbright Program, International Research Travel Grants: The Mario Einaudi Center and its associated Programs offer a wide range of support and assistance to graduate students in search of funding for their international research, study, and scholarship. See website for deadlines, usually late January.

Graduate School Fellowship Database

A searchable database of fellowships of all kinds – well worth a look! http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/fellowships/

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSFGRFP):   http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=6201

The National Science Foundation funds research and education in most fields of science and engineering. For US citizens and permanent residents, these are very competitive, but they provide a multi-year package of fellowship funding. College seniors, first and second-year students with no more than 12 months of graduate study (i.e. no MA/MS degree) are eligible. It is most advisable to apply in your first year, if you are eligible. Even if you feel you do not have much linguistics research experience, the experience of writing the proposal is worthwhile. You will also get feedback from the NSF Fellowship Panel, which you can incorporate into an improved application the following year, if you do not succeed the first time. If you wait until your final year of eligibility to apply, you cannot take a second chance. The Graduate School requires that you apply for external funding at some point; you may as well go for this one.

Social Science Research Council fellowships: https://www.ssrc.org/fellowships-and-opportunities/

Most support from the Council goes to predissertation, dissertation, and postdoctoral fellowships, offered through annual, peer-reviewed competitions.

NSF dissertation improvement grants (DDRIG): these are for post-A-exam dissertation-writers. There is no US citizenship requirement. The grants supply up to $12,000 for research-related expenses. Deadlines are July 15th and January 15th of each year. The Principal Investigator should be the student's dissertation advisor, and the student should be the Co-Principal Investigator. It is expected that the student (Co-PI) will author the proposal, which will then be submitted through the university by the dissertation advisor (PI). http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505033&org=SBE&sel_org=SBE&from=fund

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships http://www.acls.org/programs/dcf/

Conferences/Research Opportunities/Travel

The achievement of an advanced degree in linguistics involves more than the successful completion of a certain number of courses; advanced students are expected to demonstrate an active involvement in the scholarship of the field, e.g., by presenting the results of their research at scholarly or professional meetings.  In the highly competitive academic job market, prospective employers place considerable weight on evidence of commitment to research.

The Graduate School supports graduate students for one conference per academic year. You will need to submit the Conference Grant Application 2022  (online) with all required signatures, brief statement of relevance of conference with research, one page abstract of presenting material & acceptance email from a conference agent. You should submit your application prior to the conference, however applications will be accepted up to 30 days after the START date of the conference. Please note that the deadlines for these awards are firm.  

Applications received after the deadline will be awarded a maximum of 1/2 the conference amount.  

Please submit completed applications online with the link above.

Eligibility -

• Recipients must be enrolled full-time in a graduate degree program through the Graduate School and be a registered student during the term in which the conference takes place.
• Students must be presenting a paper or poster at the conference for which funds are requested. In the event of dual authorship of a paper/poster accepted for presentation, only the presenting author may receive an award.
• Only one award will be considered during the academic year, which is from July 1 through June 30.

The field also has an allotment of money to supplement the Graduate School funding for travel expenses. These funds may be requested in writing from the field assistant, [email protected] . Please include the title of your paper/poster and the notice of your conference acceptance with your request.

• First request:      $250.00
• Second request: $250.00

You may combine these two $250 awards for ONE lump sum award of $500.  You may not receive more than $500 from the department during the fiscal year, running from July 1-June 30.

*If you are attending virtual conferences, you may still apply for funding to cover registration costs. Please submit costs for consideration.

Research Travel

The Graduate School awards a small number of grants for research-related travel in the United States or overseas. Students may also apply to the Einaudi Center for additional funds for international travel.

Research travel grant applications are available on the grad school website under forms ( Conference Grant Application ). Students who have passed their A-exam prior to initiating their travel are eligible to apply. Forms are due October 1 for fall awards and February 1 for spring and summer awards. Awards are announced in December and March.

The Mario Einaudi Center and its associated Programs sponsor the International Research Travel Grants. These grants provide travel support for Cornell University graduate students conducting short-term research and/or fieldwork in countries outside the United States. The deadline is the first work day in February. See website for details, http://einaudi.cornell.edu/international-research-travel-grants

In Absentia

In absentia status provides an opportunity for graduate students to engage in approved study in a location at least 100 miles away from the University’s Ithaca campus during the academic year while continuing to work under the guidance of the Special Committee. Provided the proposed arrangement enhances the student’s program of study, the student may earn registration units. Students studying in absentia are eligible for fellowships, assistantships, student health insurance, and educational loans. Please file the In Absentia petition ( In Absentia Petition ). Again, please plan ahead to obtain signatures. Failure to file this form with the graduate school by the deadline (June 15, fall or academic year/November 1, spring semester only) will accrue bursar charges for full tuition and health insurance.

Leave of Absence

A leave of absence can be granted for personal or medical reasons, but the process is different for each type of leave.  A health leave of absence requires filing with Cornell Health. More information is available at https://health.cornell.edu/services/health-leave-absence

The maximum number of years allowed for leave of absence is four. To register past the four-year limit, an individual first must apply for readmission. A student who takes a leave of absence relinquishes the access to campus facilities and personnel that normally accompanies student status. However, students are eligible to enroll in the Student Health Insurance Plan (SHIP) for a period of up to 12 months by contacting the Student Insurance Office at (607) 255- 6363. Upon registration after a personal leave of absence, a student is not guaranteed continuation of the financial aid package offered at the time of original admission to the Graduate School. U.S. government regulations require that a student holding a non-immigrant visa who takes a personal leave of absence must either (1) leave the U.S. within 15 days or (2) apply for optional practical training before the effective leave of absence date. Before leaving Cornell, such a student taking a leave of absence should contact Graduate School Student Services and the International Students and Scholars Office for information on maintaining visa eligibility for re-entering the United States.

Active file fee : A doctoral candidate (a Ph.D. student who has passed the A exam) who has earned six or more registration units is required to pay an active file fee. The fee will be charged for each semester of leave, up to a maximum of six semesters. The active file fee is charged based on the date of the final dissertation submission, not the date of the final examination. The active file fee is not charged for summers. Consult the Graduate School regarding fees.

Leave upon completion of degree : Students who complete the degree prior to the end of the fall or spring semester can file for a leave upon completion; tuition will be prorated accordingly.

Candidate for degree only fee : A Master’s degree student who returns to the University from a leave to take a final examination must register for the day as a Candidate for Degree Only (CDO) and pay an administrative fee. Contact your Graduate Student Services Representative regarding registering for the day of your final exam.

Parental Accommodation

The University offers graduate students two forms of accommodation for childbirth, newborn care, adoption, foster care, and acute child health care needs. Students may select six-weeks paid accommodation (for fully funded graduate students only) or up to one year of reduced-load registered student status not counting toward time-to-degree limits (available to all students).

https://gradschool.cornell.edu/policies/maternity-and-paternity-options-parental-accommodation/

Summer Registration

Students who receive summer support must be actively pursuing their academic program over the summer months.  Students must register with the Graduate School for the summer in order to receive summer support. Beginning in 2014, students must submit an academic plan to receive summer funding. You may work an additional eight hours of work per week on a project with your advisor and/or another faculty member.

Cornell Linguistics Circle (CLC)

The Cornell Linguistics Circle (CLC) is the graduate student group of the Cornell Department of Linguistics.  Students from linguistics and related fields are welcome to attend CLC meetings and participate in planned activities. The CLC serves to promote exchange of ideas among graduate students in the field and to advocate for the graduate student body within the department. Throughout the course of the academic year the CLC invites a series of outside speakers from linguistics departments around the country and the world (mentioned above in the section on colloquia).  Speakers deliver talks attended by faculty and graduate students (followed by a CLC-sponsored reception, of course!) and are often available for one-on-one meetings with interested students.

Keys/Mailboxes/Copiers

Keys to the building and mail room are issued through the main office. Our Labs and lounges have combination locks; if you will need access, see the main office. The lounges on the second floor are open to all; we ask only that you keep them clean. When you take a leave of absence, you are no longer considered a registered graduate student, and, therefore, must return your keys to the main office.

Mailboxes for all departmental faculty, staff, and graduate students are located in 203 Morrill Hall.  Most department information is primarily sent by e-mail. Important notices are also posted on the Linguistics Field Board next to the 2nd floor elevator.  Conferences and calls for papers will be posted on the bulletin board by room 219. But most notices are sent by e-mail – it is your responsibility to check your mail regularly!

The Linguistics Department copier/scanner machines are for professional use and are located in 222 Morrill Hall. The color copier/scanner has a thumb drive which some of you might find useful.

All keys must be returned upon graduation.

Grad Student Offices

The department assigns graduate students with desk space. Students in their first five years of funding are given priority to desk space. Most of the grad desks are in the basement, often within one of the labs. There is a microwave and refrigerator in B08 or you may use the lounge on the second floor.

Linguistics Labs

There are several research labs in Morrill Hall. Details about the facilities available in each can be found by clicking on the links below.

The Computational Linguistics Lab , B07, contains an educational classroom for special events and space for computational linguistics research by grad students, undergraduate research projects, and grant research. The Lab is part of a larger Natural Language Processing group at Cornell, including faculty and students in Computer Science, Psychology, and Information Science. The Faculty of Computing and Information Science provides system administration support for the lab, and some computational work is done on hardware at the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Advanced Computing.

The Phonetics Lab , B09, provides an integrated environment for the experimental study of speech and language, including its production, perception, and acquisition. Its facilities include a variety of hardware and software for analyzing and editing speech, for running experiments, for synthesizing speech, and for developing and testing phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguistic models. There is a lab classroom, and there are regular lab and data analysis meetings.

The Language Documentation Lab , 226A, provides resources and laboratory space for research involving language documentation, description, and analysis, with an emphasis on understudied languages. Currently there are three portable field recorders as well as a few microphones, and other fieldwork equipment to be added later. Also, in the works is a workstation with various software packages for fieldwork and language documentation, such as ELAN.  A wiki has been created for the lab for general fieldwork information, tips, and to track equipment. The wiki will also contain a record of resources for fieldwork, including information on grants.

The Interface Lab , 103, Interface Research Group focuses on understanding the interfaces between phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. These include phenomena such as cliticization, focus and information structure, intonation, the syntax of the left periphery. Experimental studies and corpus-based research figure prominently in our work, utilizing the resources of the Cornell Phonetics Lab, as well as resources at our collaborating labs.

Linguistics Meaning Lab (LiME) , B06, is hosted in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. At the LiMe Lab we investigate all facets of linguistic meaning, from its most deterministic aspects to the fleeting meanings that arise during conversation. To investigate this question, we use insights from multiple fields such as formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, psycholinguistics and cognitive science more generally.

Contacts and Resources

Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) Miloje Despic, 212 Morrill Hall, [email protected] Check office door for office hours, appointments by e-mail; plan accordingly for DGS signature.

Graduate Field Assistant (GFA) [email protected]

Code of Legislation of the Graduate Faculty https://gradschool.cornell.edu/policies/#results

Graduate Student Services & Registrar [email protected]

Thesis and Dissertation http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/thesis-and-dissertation

Graduate School Forms http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/forms

• BA Linguistics
• BA Speech Sciences
• Diploma in Linguistics
• Opportunities
• Beyond the BA
• Masters’ Programs
• PhD Program
• Theses & Dissertations
• Continuing Education
• Graduate Students
• In Memoriam
• Labs & Groups
• First Nations Languages
• Research Interest Registration
• Field Methods Class
• Publications
• Recurring Events
• Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
• Job Opportunities

PhD Linguistics

The PhD in Linguistics program is reserved for those interested in advanced training in fieldwork and research while developing expertise in an area of their choice.

Program Overview

Our department covers a broad range of research topics, with substantial coverage of syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, and pragmatics. We approach these topics from several different research traditions and backgrounds, with particular strengths in formal-theoretical linguistics, experimental and field linguistics, acquisition, and computational approaches to the study of communicative behaviour.

Program Requirements

Students in the PhD Linguistics program must complete a minimum of 30 credits of coursework under the following requirements:

• LING 508: Phonetic Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• LING 510: Phonological Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• LING 520: Syntactic Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• LING 525: Semantic Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• Please note that first-year breadth courses are waived if equivalent courses have been taken elsewhere.
• LING 503: Topics in Language Acquisition (3 credits)
• LING 505A: Issues in Morphological Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• LING 511 : Topics in Phonology (3 credits)
• LING 513: Topics in Phonetics (3 credits)
• LING 521: Topics in Syntax (3 credits)
• LING 527: Topics in Semantics (3 credits)
• Please note that more than one section of LING 530 can be counted towards this requirement, with each three-credit section counting as one course.
• LING 532: Field Methods in Linguistics II
• LING 531: Field Methods in LInguistics I (3 credits)
• The remaining six credits can be completed with either LING 532, LING 518, and/or an appropriate methods-related course within in Linguistics or in a different department
• Thesis Requirement (6 credits) : LING 549C: Master’s Thesis
• Remaining 9 credits: The remaining nine credits must be at the 500 or 600 level and chosen with explicit approval from the supervisory committee; courses may be from Linguistics or another appropriate department.

First-year graduate students who do not have sufficient background for the first-year graduate courses are expected to take the appropriate undergraduate courses prior to registration in the graduate course.

Here are three sample course sequences that students usually take:

Sequence 1: 

Term 1: Breadth: LING 510, LING 520; Depth: LING 503

Term 2: Breadth: LING 508, LING 525; Depth: LING 511

Term 3: Depth: LING 513; Methods: LING 518, LING 531

Term 4: Depth: LING 530; Depth/Methods: LING 532

Sequence 2: 

Term 1: Breadth: LING 510, LING 520; Depth: LING 530

Term 2: Breadth: LING 525; Depth: LING 505A, LING 521

Term 3: Depth LING 527; Methods: LING 518, LING 531

Term 4: Depth/Methods LING 532

Sequence 3: 

Term 1: Breadth: LING 510; Depth: LING 503; Methods: 3 credits in statistics

Term 3: Depth LING 513; Methods: LING 518, LING 531

Term 4: Depth LING 530; LING 530

Language requirement

In order to graduate, students must have a sound knowledge of one language other than English. They must fulfill this language requirement by the time of their thesis prospectus submission.

The language to fulfill this requirement is expected to be chosen on the basis of its relevance for the student’s research program, in consultation and by approval of the student’s supervisory committee. Relevance can be determined by a variety of factors such as the following:

• The language is the object of the student’s research, or is closely related to the language of research; for example, where a student’s research focuses on Yoruba, knowledge of Yoruba could fulfill the requirement, or where the student’s research is on St’at’imcets, knowledge of Halkomelem could fulfill the requirement.
• There is a significant and relevant linguistic literature in the language; for example, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Russian could fulfill the requirement.
• The language serves as a medium for conducting linguistic research relevant to the student’s program of research; for example, Hausa could fulfill the language requirement for a student conducting research on a language of northern Nigeria.

Students may fulfill the language requirements in various ways:

• Certain departments at UBC periodically schedule reading knowledge examinations. This exam evaluates a student’s language competence based on the translation of a text (approximately 1000 words) relating to the student’s field of study. A minimum second class standing (B- or better) must be obtained on this exam in order to satisfy the Foreign Language Requirement. For further information on such examinations, contact the appropriate departments.
• If you speak a language natively, your native proficiency can be accepted by the supervisory committee.
• If you have completed a program of post-secondary language study (a minimum of 12 credits or equivalent). A minimum second class standing (B- or better) must be obtained for these credits in order to satisfy the Foreign Language Requirement.
• For other languages, it may be necessary to establish an ad hoc mechanism for conducting an evaluation of the student’s knowledge. In such cases, the student should make a written request to their supervisory committee, including a proposal for how such an examination can take place, and including a proposal for a qualified examiner. Students considering this option should be aware that the requirements (including the required level of competence in the language and how to demonstrate it) may vary extensively from case to case, depending on the norms of the language community involved.

Qualifying papers

Each PhD student is required to submit two Qualifying Papers, in areas to be established in consultation with and subject to approval by the supervisory committee. Balancing a student’s research interests with attention to research breadth should be a major goal in choosing topics. Each Qualifying Paper is an independently written research paper, developed under the guidance of a faculty member or members, presented orally to the Department, and passed before a faculty committee.

The paper must make a substantive original contribution to current work in the area and exhibit clarity in form of presentation. The desired scale is that of a paper in a conference proceedings, with content considered to be at the level of a one-term second year graduate seminar paper.

As part of the Qualifying Paper process, and before beginning work on the paper, a student must have a short proposal for each paper approved by the supervisory committee. The proposal must establish the specific area and problem(s) to be addressed and cite a few key references from the literature which will be surveyed. The committee will normally respond to the proposal within 2 weeks of its submission. The Qualifying Paper proposal should follow the formatting guidelines of an abstract for the Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, with the following addition: without exceeding the one-page length limit, the proposal should include a short budget (if there will be costs associated with completing the Qualifying Paper), budget justification and funding source (faculty member’s grant, outside grant, private funds, etc.). Also note that the content for a proposal will normally be more speculative than a conference abstract. Once approved, the Qualifying Paper proposal should be electronically filed with the Grad Admin and circulated electronically to the Department.

The final paper will be submitted to UBC Working Papers in Linguistics and must follow the UBCWPL style guidelines for length and formatting.

Continuous enrolment

Until their MA thesis prospectus has been approved, all MA students are expected to maintain a regular, active, physical presence in the Department. This can include participation in lab/project/reading groups, attending colloquia, research seminars or other ad hoc departmental events, meetings with their supervisor, committee members or other researchers in relevant areas. Certain circumstances may necessitate a student’s absence during some of this period (e.g. for field work); such absences should be discussed with the supervisory committee.

At all stages of the program, a student and their supervisor should be in regular contact and communication. At the thesis/dissertation stage, such contact should happen at least once a month (again, barring extenuating circumstances), either through in-person meetings, videoconferencing, or communication/reporting over email.

Supervision

A Research Supervisor is appointed for a student before the beginning of their first year in the program. The Graduate Advisor and the Research Supervisor, in consultation with the incoming student, will establish a three-member Temporary Supervisory Committee no later than the end of the first week of the first term.

Prior to registration for the second year, the Temporary Supervisory Committee shall be dissolved and a new Supervisory Committee shall be established. A MA Supervisory Committee consists minimally of the Research Supervisor and two additional members. Normally the members of the supervisory committee are from the Department of Linguistics; if the students committee includes members from outside the Department of Linguistics, a majority must be departmental members. Establishing a Research Supervisor is the joint responsibility of the student and the Graduate Advisor.

Both new and continuing MA students will have a meeting with their Supervisory Committee during the last week of August or in early September. At this meeting students can discuss their course work and other aspects of their program. Incoming students are requested to bring with them copies of the calendars of course offerings from the institutions they previously attended (other than UBC). At the end of April or the beginning of May, all students will meet with their Supervisory Committee to discuss the year’s progress and to plan further work. Any changes in a graduate student’s program must be approved by the Supervisory Committee.

The Graduate Advisor, in advising students, makes every effort to ensure that they have satisfied all the requirements for the degree — language requirements, course work, etc. However, it is ultimately every student’s responsibility to ensure that at the time he/she applies for the degree he/she has met all the requirements. Separate records of a student’s program and progress are kept by the Faculty of Graduate Studies; these records are obtained from information provided by the Graduate Advisor and are used to determine a student’s ultimate eligibility for graduation.

Annual evaluation

The Faculty will meet in April or May each year to discuss the progress of each student in the PhD program. The student’s supervisor will inform them of the results of the evaluation. If a student is not making satisfactory progress, they will either be required to withdraw from the program immediately or will be placed on probation and told what conditions must be fulfilled to obtain a satisfactory standing. If a student on probation has not fulfilled these conditions by the end of the following semester, they will then normally be required to withdraw from the program.

Dissertation

The dissertation marks the culmination of the PhD program. A dissertation should be an original and independent research project which makes some contribution to knowledge in the special area elected by the student.The dissertation marks the culmination of the PhD program. A dissertation should be an original and independent research project which makes some contribution to knowledge in the special area elected by the student.

By the end of a student’s third year, the student must submit to the Graduate Advisor a dissertation prospectus, along with the appropriate approval form signed by the members of the dissertation committee, and circulate the prospectus electronically to the Department. The content of a dissertation prospectus should be along the lines of an NSERC Discovery Grant or a SSHRC Insight Grant; it should have the following components:

• Summary (1 page maximum)
• Detailed description (6 pages maximum)
• Bibliography
• Budget (if there will be costs associated with completing the dissertation research)
• Budget justification (as appropriate)

Dissertations should be prepared in accordance with the thesis formatting regulations required by Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. Dissertations which do not meet the standards specified may be rejected. Documentation should follow the style guide of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, Language, or the American Psychological Association.

The completed dissertation will be read by a specialist from outside the University, arranged by the Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at least three months before the candidate expects to take the final oral examination. The student’s research supervisor and the Graduate Advisor will forward a list of names of specialists who might serve as External Examiner using the Doctoral Dissertation Form. When the dissertation has been approved for submission to the External Examiner, the candidate will take the final oral defence. This is a formal, public examination, chaired by an appointee of the Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and attended by the members of the examining committee and other interested persons.

Students nearing the final stages of thesis writing should familiarize themselves with the timeline to the oral dissertation defense . During the weeks prior to the oral examination, students are strongly encouraged to give a practice oral presentation, ideally during a departmental research seminar slot. Practice orals should follow the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies format, allowing 30 minutes for a presentation, and a longer period for questions. While examining committee members are not prohibited from attending, practice orals should not be viewed as an opportunity to prepare students for specific questions that students will be asked by committee members at the official defence.

The candidate submits an electronic copy of the final dissertation to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. The electronic copy will be deposited in the cIRcle on-line repository, and linked from the department website. The final oral exam may be held at any time of the year (except from mid-December to mid-January) provided that the examining committee can be assembled.

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The Caribbean is a region of a myriad of languages, Caribbean sign languages included. In this episode, we’re joined by Caribbean sign language scholar Kris M Ali to discuss the diversity of sign languages, from the shores of Jamaica to the Bay Islands. It's not just about communication; it's a tapestry of identity, history, and resiliency. We uncover the challenges faced by lesser-known sign languages and the potential harm of a one-size-fits-all approach to language policy. Our conversation traverses the cultural significance behind these languages, the vibrant activism of local communities that has sparked change, the battles for legal recognition, and the power these languages hold in fostering rights for the Deaf community. Join us for our first discussion and stay tuned for Part II coming soon. Be sure to check out the transcript of this episode here.  Kris Ali is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at University of California Santa Barbara. Her research interests are broadly Caribbean languages, language documentation and description, social and linguistic justice for Caribbean people, decolonial theory, queer and trans linguistics and sign language linguistics. She uses collaborative and community-based research methods, is interested in indigenous research methodologies and follows the Caribbean tradition of liberatory linguistics in which she was trained during her first two degrees at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. She is a trained Trinidad and Tobago Sign Language interpreter. Home for her is Trinidad and Tobago. Learn more about Kris on her website and connect with her on LinkedIn. Support the showConnect with Strictly Facts - Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Youtube Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate the Show Leave a review on your favorite podcast platform Share this episode with someone who loves Caribbean history and culture Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Share the episode on social media and tag us Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education Produced by Breadfruit Media

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Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers

Associated data.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/ supplementary material .

High citations most often characterize quality research that reflects the foci of the discipline. This study aims to spotlight the most recent hot topics and the trends looming from the highly cited papers (HCPs) in Web of Science category of linguistics and language & linguistics with bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric information of the 143 HCPs based on Essential Citation Indicators was retrieved and used to identify and analyze influential contributors at the levels of journals, authors, and countries. The most frequently explored topics were identified by corpus analysis and manual checking. The retrieved topics can be grouped into five general categories: multilingual-related , language teaching , and learning related , psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related , methods and tools-related , and others . Topics such as bi/multilingual(ism) , translanguaging , language/writing development , models , emotions , foreign language enjoyment (FLE) , cognition , anxiety are among the most frequently explored. Multilingual and positive trends are discerned from the investigated HCPs. The findings inform linguistic researchers of the publication characteristics of the HCPs in the linguistics field and help them pinpoint the research trends and directions to exert their efforts in future studies.

1. Introduction

Citations, as a rule, exhibit a skewed distributional pattern over the academic publications: a few papers accumulate an overwhelming large citations while the majority are rarely, if ever, cited. Correspondingly, the highly cited papers (HCPs) receive the greatest amount of attention in the academia as citations are commonly regarded as a strong indicator of research excellence. For academic professionals, following HCPs is an efficient way to stay current with the developments in a field and to make better informed decisions regarding potential research topics and directions to exert their efforts. For academic institutions, government and private agencies, and generally the science policy makers, they keep a close eye on and take advantage of this visible indicator, citations, to make more informed decisions on research funding allocation and science policy formulation. Under the backdrop of ever-growing academic outputs, there is noticeable attention shift from publication quantity to publication quality. Many countries are developing research policies to identify “excellent” universities, research groups, and researchers ( Danell, 2011 ). In a word, HCPs showcase high-quality research, encompass significant themes, and constitute a critical reference point in a research field as they are “gold bullion of science” ( Smith, 2007 ).

2. Literature review

Bibliometrics, a term coined by Pritchard (1969) , refers to the application of mathematical methods to the analysis of academic publications. Essentially this is a quantitative method to depict publication patterns within a given field based on a body of literature. There are many bibliometric studies on natural and social sciences in general ( Hsu and Ho, 2014 ; Zhu and Lei, 2022 ) and on various specific disciplines such as management sciences ( Liao et al., 2018 ), biomass research ( Chen and Ho, 2015 ), computer sciences ( Xie and Willett, 2013 ), and sport sciences ( Mancebo et al., 2013 ; Ríos et al., 2013 ), etc. In these studies, researchers tracked developments, weighed research impacts, and highlighted emerging scientific fronts with bibliometric methods. In the field of linguistics, bibliometric studies all occurred in the past few years ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ; Lei and Liao, 2017 ; Gong et al., 2018 ; Lei and Liu, 2018 , 2019 ). These bibliometric studies mostly examined a sub-area of linguistics, such as corpus linguistics ( Liao and Lei, 2017 ), translation studies ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ), the teaching of Chinese as a second/foreign language ( Gong et al., 2018 ), academic journals like System ( Lei and Liu, 2018 ) or Porta Linguarum ( Sabiote and Rodríguez, 2015 ), etc. Although Lei and Liu (2019) took the entire discipline of linguistics under investigation, their research is exclusively focused on applied linguistics and restricted in a limited number of journals (42 journals in total), leaving publications in other linguistics disciplines and qualified journals unexamined.

Over the recent years, a number of studies have been concerned with “excellent” papers or HCPs. For example, Small (2004) surveyed the HCPs authors’ opinions on why their papers are highly cited. The strong interest, the novelty, the utility, and the high importance of the work were among the most frequently mentioned. Most authors also considered that their selected HCPs are indeed based on their most important work in their academic career. Aksnes (2003) investigated the characteristics of HCPs and found that they were generally authored by a large number of scientists, often involving international collaboration. Some researchers even attempted to predict the HCPs by building mathematical models, implying “the first mover advantage in scientific publication” ( Newman, 2008 , 2014 ). In other words, papers published earlier in a field generally are more likely to accumulate more citations than those published later. Although many papers addressed HCPs from different perspectives, they held a common belief that HCPs are very different from less or zero cited papers and thus deserve utmost attention in academic research ( Aksnes, 2003 ; Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Yan et al., 2022 ).

Although an increased focus on research quality can be observed in different fields, opinions diverge on the range and the inclusion criterion of excellent papers. Are they ‘highly cited’, ‘top cited’, or ‘most frequently cited’ papers? Aksnes (2003) noted two different approaches to define a highly cited article, involving absolute or relative thresholds, respectively. An absolute threshold stipulates a minimum number of citations for identifying excellent papers while a relative threshold employs the percentile rank classes, for example, the top 10% most highly cited papers in a discipline or in a publication year or in a publication set. It is important to note that citations differ significantly in different fields and disciplines. A HCP in natural sciences generally accumulates more citations than its counterpart in social sciences. Thus, it is necessary to investigate HCPs from different fields separately or adopt different inclusion criterion to ensure a valid comparison.

The present study has been motivated by two considerations. First, the sizable number of publications of varied qualities in a scientific field makes it difficult or even impossible to conduct any reliable and effective literature research. Focusing on the quality publications, the HCPs in particular, might lend more credibility to the findings on trends. Second, HCPs can serve as a great platform to discover potentially important information for the development of a discipline and understand the past, present, and future of the scientific structure. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the hot topics and publication trends in the Web of Science category of linguistics or language & linguistics (shortened as linguistics in later references) with bibliometric methods. The study aims to answer the following three questions:

• Who are the most productive and impactful contributors of the HCPs in WoS category of linguistics or language & linguistics in terms of publication venues, authors, and countries?
• What are the most frequently explored topics in HCPs?
• What are the general research trends revealed from the HCPs?

3. Materials and methods

Different from previous studies which used an arbitrary inclusion threshold (e.g., Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Hsu and Ho, 2014 ), we rely on Essential Science Indicator (ESI) to identify the HCPs. Developed by Clarivate, a leading company in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics, ESI reveals emerging science trends as well as influential individuals, institutions, papers, journals, and countries in any scientific fields of inquiry by drawing on the complete WoS databases. ESI has been chosen for the following three reasons. First, ESI adopts a stricter inclusion criterion for HCPs identification. That is, a paper is selected as a HCP only when its citations exceed the top 1% citation threshold in each of the 22 ESI subject categories. Second, ESI is widely used and recognized for its reliability and authority in identifying the top-charting work, generating “excellent” metrics including hot and highly cited papers. Third, ESI automatically updates its database to generate the most recent HCPs, especially suitable for trend studies for a specified timeframe.

3.1. Data source

The data retrieval was completed at the portal of our university library on June 20, 2022. The methods to retrieve the data are described in Table 1 . The bibliometric indicators regarding the important contributors at journal/author/country levels were obtained. Specifically, after the research was completed, we clicked the “Analyze Results” bar on the result page for the detailed descriptive analysis of the retrieved bibliometric data.

Retrieval strategies.

Several points should be noted about the search strategies. First, we searched the bibliometric data from two sub-databases of WoS core collection: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). There is no need to include the sub-database of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) because publications in the linguistics field are almost exclusively indexed in SSCI and A&HCI journals. WoS core collection was chosen as the data source because it boasts one of the most comprehensive and authoritative databases of bibliometric information in the world. Many previous studies utilized WoS to retrieve bibliometric data. van Oorschot et al. (2018) and Ruggeri et al. (2019) even indicated that WoS meets the highest standards in terms of impact factor and citation counts and hence guarantees the validity of any bibliometric analysis. Second, we do not restrict the document types as HCPs selection informed by ESI only considers articles and reviews. Third, we do not set the date range as the dataset of ESI-HCPs is automatically updated regularly to include the most recent 10 years of publications.

The aforementioned query obtained a total of 143 HCPs published in 48 journals contributed by 352 authors of 226 institutions. We then downloaded the raw bibliometric parameters of the 143 HCPs for follow-up analysis including publication years, authors, publication titles, countries, affiliations, abstracts, citation reports, etc. A complete list of the 143 HCPs can be found in the Supplementary Material . We collected the most recent impact factor (IF) of each journal from the 2022 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.1. citation analysis.

A citation threshold is the minimum number of citations obtained by ranking papers in a research field in descending order by citation counts and then selecting the top fraction or percentage of papers. In ESI, the highly cited threshold reveals the minimum number of citations received by the top 1% of papers from each of the 10 database years. In other words, a paper has to meet the minimum citation threshold that varies by research fields and by years to enter the HCP list. Of the 22 research fields in ESI, Social Science, General is a broad field covering a number of WoS categories including linguistics and language & linguistics . We checked the ESI official website to obtain the yearly highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Science , General as shown in Figure 1 ( https://esi.clarivate.com/ThresholdsAction.action ). As we can see, the longer a paper has been published, the more citations it has to receive to meet the threshold. We then divided the raw citation numbers of HCPs with the Highly Cited Thresholds in the corresponding year to obtain the normalized citations for each HCP.

Highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Sciences, General.

3.2.2. Corpus analysis and manual checking

To determine the most frequently explored topics in these HCPs, we used both corpus-based analysis of word frequency and manual checking. Specifically, the more frequently a word or phrase occurs in a specifically designed corpus, the more likely it constitutes a research topic. In this study, we built an Abstract corpus with all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs, totaling 24,800 tokens. The procedures to retrieve the research topics in the Abstract corpus were as follows. First, the 143 pieces of abstracts were saved as separate .txt files in one folder. Second, AntConc ( Anthony, 2022 ), a corpus analysis tool for concordancing and text analysis, was employed to extract lists of n-grams (2–4) in decreasing order of frequency. We also generated a list of individual nouns because sometimes individual nouns can also constitute research topics. Considering our small corpus data, we adopted both frequency (3) and range criteria (3) for topic candidacy. That is, a candidate n-gram must occur at least 3 times and in at least 3 different abstract files. The frequency threshold guarantees the importance of the candidate topics while the range threshold guarantees that the topics are not overly crowded in a few number of publications. In this process, we actually tested the frequency and range thresholds several rounds for the inclusion of all the potential topics. In total, we obtained 531 nouns, 1,330 2-grams, 331 3-grams, and 81 4-grams. Third, because most of the retrieved n-grams cannot function as meaningful research topics, we manually checked all the candidate items and discussed extensively to decide their roles as potential research topics until full agreements were reached. Finally, we read all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. In the end, we got 118 topic items in total.

4.1. Main publication venues of HCPs

Of the 48 journals which published the 143 HCPs, 17 journals have contributed at least 3 HCPs ( Table 2 ), around 71.33% of the total examined HCPs (102/143), indicating that HCPs tend to be highly concentrated in a limited number of journals. The three largest publication outlets of HCPs are Bilingualism Language and Cognition (16), International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (11), and Modern Language Journal (10). Because each journal varies greatly in the number of papers published per year and the number of HCPs is associated with journal circulations, we divided the total number of papers (TP) in the examined years (2011–2021) with the number of the HCPs to acquire the HCP percentage for each journal (HCPs/TP). The three journals with the highest HCPs/TP percentage are Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2.26), Modern Language Journal (2.08), and Bilingualism Language and Cognition (1.74), indicating that papers published in these journals have a higher probability to enter the HCPs list.

Top 17 publication venues of HCPs.

N: the number of HCPs in each journal; N%: the percentage of HCPs in each journal in the total of 143 HCPs; TP: the total number of papers in the examined timespan (2011–2021); N/TP %: the percentage of HCPs in the total journal publications in the examined time span; TC/HCP: average citations of each HCP; R: journal ranking for the designated indicator; IF: Impact Factor in the year of 2022.

In terms of the general impact of the HCPs from each journal, we divided the number of HCPs with their total citations (TC) to obtain the average citations for each HCP (TC/HCP). The three journals with the highest TC/HCP are Journal of Memory and Language (837.86), Computational Linguistics (533.75), and Journal of Pragmatics (303.75). It indicates that even in the same WoS category, HCPs in different journals have strikingly different capability to accumulate citations. For example, the TC/HCP in System is as low as 31.73, which is even less than 4% of the highest TC/HCP in Journal of Memory and Language .

In regards to the latest journal impact factor (IF) in 2022, the top four journals with the highest IF are Computational Linguistics (7.778) , Modern Language Journal (7.5), Computer Assisted Language Learning (5.964), and Language Learning (5.24). According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quantile rankings in WoS category of linguistics , all the journals on the list belong to the Q 1 (the top 25%), indicating that contributors are more likely to be attracted to contribute and cite papers in these prestigious high impact journals.

4.2. Authors of HCPs

A total of 352 authors had their names listed in the 143 HCPs, of whom 33 authors appeared in at least 2 HCPs as shown in Table 3 . We also provided in Table 3 other indicators to evaluate the authors’ productivity and impact including the total number of citations (TC), the number of citations per HCP, and the number of First author or Corresponding author HCPs (FA/CA). The reason we include the FA/CA indicator is that first authors and corresponding authors are usually considered to contribute the most and should receive greater proportion of credit in academic publications ( Marui et al., 2004 ; Dance, 2012 ).

Authors with at least 2 HCPs.

N: number of HCPs from each author; FA/CA: first author or corresponding author HCPs; TC: total citations of the HCPs from each author; C/HCP: average citations per HCP for each author.

In terms of the number of HCPs, Dewaele JM from Birkbeck Univ London tops the list with 7 HCPs with total citations of 492 (TC = 492), followed by Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol (#HCPs = 5; TC = 215) and Saito K from UCL (#HCPs = 5; TC = 576). It is to be noted that both Li C and Saito K have close academic collaborations with Dewaele JM . For example, 3 of the 5 HCPs by Li C are co-authored with Dewaele JM . The topics in their co-authored HCPs are mostly about foreign language learning emotions such as boredom , anxiety , enjoyment , the measurement , and positive psychology .

In regards to TC, Li, W . from UCL stands out as the most influential scholar among all the listed authors with total citations of 956 from 2 HCPs, followed by Norton B from Univ British Columbia (TC = 915) and Vasishth S from Univ Potsdam (TC = 694). The average citations per HCP from them are also the highest among the listed authors (478, 305, 347, respectively). It is important to note that Li, W.’ s 2 HCPs are his groundbreaking works on translanguaging which almost become must-reads for anyone who engages in translanguaging research ( Li, 2011 , 2018 ). Besides, Li, W. single authors his 2 HCPs, which is extremely rare as HCPs are often the results from multiple researchers. Norton B ’s HCPs are exploring some core issues in applied linguistics such as identity and investment , language learning , and social change that are considered the foundational work in its field ( Norton and Toohey, 2011 ; Darvin and Norton, 2015 ).

From the perspective of FA/CA papers, Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci and Technol is prominent because she is the first author of all her 5 HCPs. Her research on language learning emotions in the Chinese context is gaining widespread recognition ( Li et al., 2018 , 2019 , 2021 ; Li, 2019 , 2021 ). However, as a newly emerging researcher, most of her HCPs are published in the very recent years and hence accumulate relatively fewer citations (TC = 215). Mondada L from Univ Basel follows closely and single authors her 3 HCPs. Her work is mostly devoted to conversation analysis , multimodality , and social interaction ( Mondada, 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ).

We need to mention the following points regarding the productive authors of HCPs. First, when we calculated the number of HCPs from each author, only the papers published in the journals indexed in the investigated WoS categories were taken in account ( linguistics; language & linguistics ), which came as a compromise to protect the linguistics oriented nature of the HCPs. For example, Brysbaert M from Ghent University claimed a total of 8 HCPs at the time of the data retrieval, of which 6 HCPs were published in WoS category of psychology and more psychologically oriented, hence not included in our study. Besides, all the authors on the author list were treated equally when we calculated the number of HCPs, disregarding the author ordering. That implies that some influential authors may not be able to enter the list as their publications are comparatively fewer. Second, as some authors reported different affiliations at their different career stages, we only provide their most recent affiliation for convenience. Third, it is highly competitive to have one’s work selected as HCPs. The fact that a majority of the HCPs authors do not appear in our productive author list does not diminish their great contributions to this field. The rankings in Table 3 does not necessarily reflect the recognition authors have earned in academia at large.

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

In total, the 143 HCPs originated from 33 countries. The most productive countries that contributed at least three HCPs are listed in Table 4 . The USA took an overwhelming lead with 59 HCPs, followed distantly by England with 31 HCPs. They also boasted the highest total citations (TC = 15,770; TC = 9,840), manifesting their high productivity and strong influence as traditional powerhouses in linguistics research. In regards to the average citations per HCP, Germany , England and the USA were the top three countries (TC/HCP = 281.67, 281.14, and 267.29, respectively). Although China held the third position with 19 HCPs published, its TC/HCP is the third from the bottom (TC/HCP = 66.84). One of the important reasons is that 13 out of the 19 HCPs contributed by scholars in China are published in the year of 2020 or 2021. The newly published HCPs may need more time to accumulate citations. Besides, 18 out of the 19 HCPs in China are first author and/or corresponding authors, indicating that scholars in China are becoming more independent and gaining more voice in English linguistics research.

Top 18 countries with at least 3 HCPs.

Two points should be noted here as to the productive countries. First, we calculated the HCP contributions from the country level instead of the region level. In other words, HCP contributions from different regions of the same country will be combined in the calculation. For example, HCPs from Scotland were added to the HCPs from England . HCPs from Hong Kong , Macau , and Taiwan are put together with the HCPs from Mainland China . In this way, a clear picture of the HCPs on the country level can be painted. Second, we manually checked the address information of the first author and corresponding author for each HCP. There are some cases where the first author or the corresponding author may report affiliations from more than one country. In this case, every country in their address list will be treated equally in the FA/CA calculation. In other word, a HCP may be classified into more than one country because of the different country backgrounds of the first and/or the corresponding author.

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

The top 20 HCPs with the highest normed citations are listed in decreasing order in Table 5 . The top cited publications can guide us to better understand the development and research topics in recent years.

Top 20 HCPs.

To save space, not full information about the HCPs is given. Some article titles have been abbreviated if they are too lengthy; for the authors, we report the first two authors and use “et al” if there are three authors or more; RC: raw citations; NC: normalized citations

By reading the titles and the abstracts of these top HCPs, we categorized the topics of the 20 HCPs into the following five groups: (i) statistical and analytical methods in (psycho)linguistics such as sentimental analysis, sentence simplification techniques, effect sizes, linear mixed models (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14), (ii) language learning/teaching emotions such enjoyment, anxiety, boredom, stress (#11, 15, 16, 18, 19), (iii) translanguaging or multilinguilism (#5, 13, 20, 17), (iv) language perception (#2, 7, 10), (v) medium of instruction (#8, 12). It is no surprise that 6 out of the top 20 HCPs are about statistical methods in linguistics because language researchers aspire to employ statistics to make their research more scientific. Besides, we noticed that the papers on language teaching/learning emotions on the list are all published in the year of 2020 and 2021, indicating that these emerging topics may deserve more attention in future research. We also noticed two Covid-19 related articles (#16, 19) explored the emotions teachers and students experience during the pandemic, a timely response to the urgent need of the language learning and teaching community.

It is of special interest to note that papers from the journals indexed in multiple JCR categories seem to accumulate more citations. For example, Journal of Memory and Language , American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology , and Computational Linguistics are indexed both in SSCI and SCIE and contribute the top 4 HCPs, manifesting the advantage of these hybrid journals in amassing citations compared to the conventional language journals. Besides, different to findings from Yan et al. (2022) that most of the top HCPs in the field of radiology are reviews in document types, 19 out of the top 20 HCPs are research articles instead of reviews except Macaro et al. (2018) .

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

After obtaining the corpus based topic items, we read all the titles and abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. Table 6 presents the top research topics with the observed frequency of 5 or above. We grouped these topics into five broad categories: bilingual-related, language learning/teaching-related, psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related, methods and tools-related, and others . The observed frequency count for each topic in the abstract corpus were included in the brackets. We found that about 34 of the 143 HCPs are exploring bilingual related issues, the largest share among all the categorized topics, testifying its academic popularity in the examined timespan. Besides, 30 of the 143 HCPs are investigating language learning/teaching-related issues, with topics ranging from learners (e.g., EFL learners, individual difference) to multiple learning variables (e.g., learning strategy, motivation, agency). The findings here will be validated by the analysis of the keywords.

Categorization of the most explored research topics.

N: the number of the HCPs in each topic category; ELF: English as a lingua franca; CLIL: content and language integrated learning; FLE: foreign language enjoyment; FLCA: foreign language classroom anxiety

Several points should be mentioned regarding the topic candidacy. First, for similar topic expressions, we used a cover term and added the frequency counts. For example, multilingualism is a cover term for bilinguals, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and multilingualism . Second, for nouns of singular and plural forms (e.g., emotion and emotions ) or for items with different spellings (e.g., meta analysis and meta analyses ), we combined the frequency counts. Third, we found that some longer items (3 grams and 4 grams) could be subsumed to short ones (2 grams or monogram) without loss of essential meaning (e.g., working memory from working memory capacity ). In this case, the shorter ones were kept for their higher frequency. Fourth, some highly frequent terms were discarded because they were too general to be valuable topics in language research, for example, applied linguistics , language use , second language .

5. Discussion and implications

Based on 143 highly cited papers collected from the WoS categories of linguistics , the present study attempts to present a bird’s eye view of the publication landscape and the most updated research themes reflected from the HCPs in the linguistics field. Specifically, we investigated the important contributors of HCPs in terms of journals, authors and countries. Besides, we spotlighted the research topics by corpus-based analysis of the abstracts and a detailed analysis of the top HCPs. The study has produced several findings that bear important implications.

The first finding is that the HCPs are highly concentrated in a limited journals and countries. In regards to journals, those in the spheres of bilingualism and applied linguistics (e.g., language teaching and learning) are likely to accumulate more citations and hence to produce more HCPs. Journals that focus on bilingualism from a linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific perspective are the most frequent outlets of HCPs as evidenced by the top two productive journals of HCPs, Bilingualism Language and Cognition and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism . This can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of bilingual-related research and the development of cognitive measurement techniques. The merits of analyzing publication venues of HCPs are two folds. One the one hand, it can point out which sources of high-quality publications in this field can be inquired for readers as most of the significant and cutting-edge achievements are concentrated in these prestigious journals. On the other hand, it also provides essential guidance or channels for authors or contributors to submit their works for higher visibility.

In terms of country distributions, the traditional powerhouses in linguistics research such as the USA and England are undoubtedly leading the HCP publications in both the number and the citations of the HCPs. However, developing countries are also becoming increasing prominent such as China and Iran , which could be traceable in the funding and support of national language policies and development policies as reported in recent studies ( Ping et al., 2009 ; Lei and Liu, 2019 ). Take China as an example. Along with economic development, China has given more impetus to academic outputs with increased investment in scientific research ( Lei and Liao, 2017 ). Therefore, researchers in China are highly motivated to publish papers in high-quality journals to win recognition in international academia and to deal with the publish or perish pressure ( Lee, 2014 ). These factors may explain the rise of China as a new emerging research powerhouse in both natural and social sciences, including English linguistics research.

The second finding is the multilingual trend in linguistics research. The dominant clustering of topics regarding multilingualism can be understood as a timely response to the multilingual research fever ( May, 2014 ). 34 out of the 143 HCPs have such words as bilingualism, bilingual, multilingualism , translanguaging , etc., in their titles, reflecting a strong multilingual tendency of the HCPs. Multilingual-related HCPs mainly involve three aspects: multilingualism from the perspectives of psycholinguistics and cognition (e.g., Luk et al., 2011 ; Leivada et al., 2020 ); multilingual teaching (e.g., Schissel et al., 2018 ; Ortega, 2019 ; Archila et al., 2021 ); language policies related to multilingualism (e.g., Shen and Gao, 2018 ). As a pedagogical process initially used to describe the bilingual classroom practice and also a frequently explored topic in HCPs, translanguaging is developed into an applied linguistics theory since Li’s Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language ( Li, 2018 ). The most common collocates of translanguaging in the Abstract corpus are pedagogy/pedagogies, practices, space/spaces . There are two main reasons for this multilingual turn. First, the rapid development of globalization, immigration, and overseas study programs greatly stimulate the use and research of multiple languages in different linguistic contexts. Second, in many non-English countries, courses are delivered through languages (mostly English) besides their mother tongue ( Clark, 2017 ). Students are required to use multiple languages as resources to learn and understand subjects and ideas. The burgeoning body of English Medium Instruction literature in higher education is in line with the rising interest in multilingualism. Due to the innate multidisciplinary nature, it is to be expected that, multilingualism, the topic du jour, is bound to attract more attention in the future.

The third finding is the application of Positive Psychology (PP) in second language acquisition (SLA), that is, the positive trend in linguistic research. In our analysis, 20 out of 143 HCPs have words or phrases such as emotions, enjoyment, boredom, anxiety , and positive psychology in their titles, which might signal a shift of interest in the psychology of language learners and teachers in different linguistic environments. Our study shows Foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is the most frequently explored emotion, followed by foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). In fact, the topics of PP are not entirely new to SLA. For example, studies of language motivations, affections, and good language learners all provide roots for the emergence of PP in SLA ( Naiman, 1978 ; Gardner, 2010 ). In recent years, both research and teaching applications of PP in SLA are building rapidly, with a diversity of topics already being explored such as positive education and PP interventions. It is to be noted that SLA also feeds back on PP theories and concepts besides drawing inspirations from it, which makes it “an area rich for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas” ( Macintyre et al., 2019 ).

It should be noted that subjectivity is involved when we decide and categorize the candidate topic items based on the Abstract corpus. However, the frequency and range criteria guarantee that these items are actually more explored in multiple HCPs, thus indicating topic values for further investigation. Some high frequent n-grams are abandoned because they are too general or not meaningful topics. For example, applied linguistics is too broad to be included as most of the HCPs concern issues in this research line instead of theoretical linguistics. By meaningful topics, we mean that the topics can help journal editors and readers quickly locate their interested fields ( Lei and Liu, 2019 ), as the author keywords such as bilingualism , emotions , and individual differences . The examination of the few 3/4-grams and monograms (mostly nouns) revealed that most of them were either not meaningful topics or they could be subsumed in the 2-grams. Besides, there is inevitably some overlapping in the topic categorizations. For example, some topics in the language teaching and learning category are situated and discussed within the context of multilingualism. The merits of topic categorizations are two folds: to better monitor the overlapping between the Abstract corpus-based topic items and the keywords; to roughly delineate the research strands in the HCPs for future research.

It should also be noted that all the results were based on the retrieved HCPs only. The study did not aim to paint a comprehensive and full picture of the whole landscape of linguistic research. Rather, it specifically focused on the most popular literature in a specified timeframe, thus generating the snapshots or trends in linguistic research. One of the important merits of this methodology is that some newly emerging but highly cited researchers can be spotlighted and gain more academic attention because only the metrics of HCPs are considered in calculation. On the contrary, the exclusion of some other highly cited researchers in general such as Rod Ellis and Ken Hyland just indicates that their highly cited publications are not within our investigated timeframe and cannot be interpreted as their diminishing academic influence in the field. Besides, the study does not consider the issue of collaborators or collaborations in calculating the number of HCPs for two reasons. First, although some researchers are regular collaborators such as Li CC and Dewaele JM, their individual contribution can never be undermined. Second, the study also provides additional information about the number of the FA/CA HCPs from each listed author, which may aid readers in locating their interested research.

We acknowledge that our study has some limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our study focuses on the HCPs extracted from WoS SSCI and A&HCI journals, the alleged most celebrated papers in this field. Future studies may consider including data from other databases such as Scopus to verify the findings of the present study. Second, our Abstract corpus-based method for topic extraction involved human judgement. Although the final list was the result of several rounds of discussions among the authors, it is difficult or even impossible to avoid subjectivity and some worthy topics may be unconsciously missed. Therefore, future research may consider employing automatic algorithms to extract topics. For example, a dependency-based machine learning approach can be used to identify research topics ( Zhu and Lei, 2021 ).

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

SY: conceptualization and methodology. SY and LZ: writing-review and editing and writing-original draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund of China MOE under the grant 20YJC740076 and 18YJC740141.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586/full#supplementary-material

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