The Setting
The University of California at San Diego is located in La Jolla,
a beautiful area near the northern limits of the city. The thousand-acre
campus spreads from the coast across a large portion of the adjacent
mesa, high above the Pacific Ocean. Much of the land is wooded with eucalyptus and pine trees.
To the east lie mountains, to the west the sea. Since its founding
in the 1960's, UCSD has become one of the foremost educational and
research institutions in the nation. The campus and the surrounding
region boast an extraordinary array of well-known scholars and offer
broad opportunities for study and research of the highest quality.
These opportunities are especially strong and diversified in language-related
areas.
The Department
The UCSD Department of Linguistics is unique among leading doctoral
programs. Three traits in particular contribute to its distinctive
character and define its educational philosophy.
First, the faculty conduct research and offer in-depth instruction
in a variety of theoretical frameworks, both formal and cognitive/functional.
Students find their training in multiple perspectives to be both
educationally beneficial and advantageous in seeking employment
and conducting their professional careers.
Second, the program emphasizes the study of diverse languages,
for their own sake as well as for the empirical testing of theoretical
claims. The faculty have research interests in numerous, typologically
varied languages. Theoretical courses emphasize cross-linguistic
generalizations and the analysis of a wide range of languages.
Third, the department is an active and integral part of the cognitive
science and neuroscience communities at UCSD, which rank among the
world's finest. For example, most Linguistics faculty also have
appointments in the Cognitive Science Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program,
which many Linguistics students participate in. Faculty and students
engage in a spectrum of experimental research that encompasses phonetics,
signed languages, psycholinguistics, event-related brain potentials
(ERPs), and connectionist modeling.
These distinctive properties reflect the faculty's commitment to
accurate, cognitively realistic analyses of language structure that
are informed by linguistic theories, and make a substantial contribution
to their development, but are not confined by the limitations of
any particular theoretical formulation. There is extensive collaboration
among adherents of different approaches, creating an atmosphere
in which the mechanical details of theories are not allowed to obscure
their substantive results and points of convergence. With its instructional
and research program, the department is actively working toward
a synthesis of the basic insights and findings of diverse theoretical
and experimental perspectives.
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Department of Linguistics :: University of California,
San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive #108 :: La Jolla, CA 92093-0108
Phone: (858) 534-3600 :: TDD: (858) 822-255 :: Fax: (858) 534-4789
E-mail: linginfo@ling.ucsd.edu
:: http://ling.ucsd.edu/
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