​​​​Mission Statement​​
The mission of the Department of Linguistics & Cognitive Science includes excellence in teaching, research, and service. Our teaching mission includes delivery of excellence in instruction in our doctoral program, masters program, and undergraduate major and minors, as well as our contribution to general education, multicultural education, discovery learning, second writing, and the first year experience for our freshmen majors.
The mission of the Ph.D. Program is to provide students with the intellectual ability to understand, create, integrate, and apply sophisticated discipline-specific knowledge. Discipline sub-areas include theoretical, experimental and applied linguistics. Because knowledge is dynamic, students are additionally expected to learn the discipline's system of thinking, knowing, and acting, in order to acquire and evaluate future knowledge; i.e. graduates are expected to fully understand the intellectual system which underlies research in all fields of Linguistics. The faculty place an emphasis on involving graduate students in original, innovative research. This is achieved by a series of required courses in the core areas of linguistics which focus on the acquisition of the fundamental knowledge required to be able to conduct research in areas such as syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, semantics. Students are expected to engage in original research in one of the core areas by taking advanced research seminars, and by participating in various in-house groups aimed at presenting student and faculty research. Students are also are encouraged to combine the core areas with additional areas of specialization, such as experimental psycholinguistics, language acquisition, philosophy of mind, the description and documentation of endangered and underdescribed languages, and computational linguistics.
The department is committed to providing an excellent education in Linguistics through helping students develop their capacity to:
- Identify and investigate substantive research questions in various subfields of Linguistics;
- Critically evaluate previous research, including the use of linguistic data, analytic methods, and theories of language and mind in the work of other scientists;
- Employ appropriate research methods to present, analyze, and articulate research results in the area of concentration;
- Possess the ability to disseminate knowledge in the area of specialization, by writing articles for peer reviewed journals and presenting work at major conferences.
Our faculty and graduate students develop and deliver excellence in courses of instruction at all levels, changing with the development of new knowledge in the discipline. Our faculty and graduate students also mentor students at all levels in keeping with the learning goals and outcomes above. In addition, our faculty and graduate students strive for excellence and national and international recognition in the creation of new knowledge in the discipline. Finally, our faculty and graduate students provide excellence in service to the profession and the governance of the department, college, and university.
Our curriculum map shows how individual courses meet these goals, as well as they meet
the 10 Goals of Undergraduate Education.​
