Linguistics and its Study at Carleton
Linguistics at Carleton, 2007-2011 (and beyond)
In the autumn of 2007, the Carleton Linguistics Program will begin to play a larger role in the curriculum of the College than we have in the past. We will welcome a new, full-time linguist to our staff. This person will be hired for two years, and we hope to have the position renewed indefinitely thereafter. With this stable (at least for the near term) enlargement of our course offerings, we will be able to accomplish two important goals. First, we will be in a position to offer better curricular support to students who wish to do advanced study in linguistics as a part of their major. We have previously assisted in a number of joint majors with other departments, but now we will be able to support interested students with a range of expertise and courses which are both deeper and broader than we have ever been able to offer before.Second, we will now have the resources to offer a major in linguistics, at least for members of the classes of 2008 through 2011. This will be a Special Major, that is, students must specially apply to the Academic Standing Committee for permission to follow it. The Program has developed a template, which will make such petitions easier to formulate, and also enhance chances of approval.
Linguistics courses at a glance
Students considering majoring in linguistics, or in constructing a joint major with another department in which linguistics plays the primary role, should review our procedures for the senior integrative exercise (‘comps’) here. We think our comps procedure is challenging and (ultimately at least) intellectually satisfying and even fun (most of the time).
We’re extremely excited about the prospect of having a number of students doing advanced work in linguistics at Carleton. We’re eager to build an environment in which students and faculty can together learn amazing things about human language. If you would like to join us, or just have questions about what we do, please contact Professor Michael Flynn at mjflynn@carleton.edu.
Philosophy of the Program
Linguistics, as it is construed at Carleton, is the study of the human language faculty, surely the most central capacity of those which constitute human nature. The discipline is driven by two fundamental questions. First, what is it that people know that allows them to deftly use the stupendously complicated systems that underlie human languages? Second, how is this capacity acquired, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically? To put this in a less technical way, we ask, what happens to individual humans, over the first few years of their lives, that allows them to gain complete mastery over systems of knowledge that are so complex that they continue to defy complete and accurate explicit description, and to do so at a time when other sorts of elaborate cognitive and social skills are quite out of reach? We also ask, what happened over the millions of years from the dawn of the primitive replicator to emergence of modern humans that makes our brains capable of a skill that, adaptive though it is, appears to elude all other species with whom we share the planet?
These are extraordinarily complicated questions, and as in every other intellectually sophisticated discipline, we find that there are a great number of specializations, which both characterize the subject matters constituent of the field as we understand it, but also serve as useful initial descriptions of the expertise of individual linguists. We might give a first approximation list of the various aspects of the human faculty we’re trying to describe, which we might call the “core”:
- semantics, the meaning of words and sentences
- syntax, well-formedness conditions on sequences of words
- morphology, the shape and structure of words
- phonology, the sound pattern for languages
- phonetics, the production and perception of the linguistic signal
Of course, there is much more we are interested in. We want to know about the acquisition of each of these components, how they change over time, how the capacities to acquire and use them arose in the species, how they are deployed in social and artistic contexts, how they are realized in the human brain, how they are managed in signed languages, how writing systems work, what all of this tells us about human nature, and much more.
Varying methodologies and subject matters make linguistics a particularly attractive component of an undergraduate major at a liberal arts college, where the investigation of significant aspects of human nature from a variety of perspectives has a high priority. To mention a few: phonetics requires knowledge of physics and human anatomy, and uses sophisticated laboratory equipment; syntax can benefit from the use of the theory of recursive functions; semantics can rely on formal logic; acquisition often involves experimental work with human subjects; metrics requires knowledge of poetic forms, and how these evolved over time; metatheory requires familiarity with the central questions of philosophy of mind, from Plato to Quine. For others we need sociology, biology and more. Linguistics is a rich area of intellectual inquiry, with significant affinities with other disciplines. Here at Carleton, we’re fortunate to have many faculty in wide array of disciplines who are interested in linguistics, and who are prepared to help students build a special course of study that exploits the many interdisciplinary connects that exist on campus.
One recent joint major was Ellen Acree (class of 2004), a joint Linguistics/Biology major. Ellen wrote her comps paper on the contribution of subcortical structures of the brain (such as the basal ganglia) to speech production. Her primary reader was Michael Flynn in Linguistics, and her cooperating faculty member in Biology was Professor Fernan Jaramillo. After taking a year off to wait tables in Dublin, Ireland, Ellen began medical school at The Ohio State University.
We welcome inquiries and proposals from students for joint majors and full majors. Contact Michael Flynn in the Linguistics Program.
