Announcing the Inaugural sessioin of the Caribbean Language and Linguistics Institute 2008
What is Linguistics?
Linguistics is the study of one of
the most important human characteristics: language.
It is an interdisciplinary field that involves the integration of
the natural sciences,
the medical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
Studying linguistics is not a matter
of learning lots of different languages,
but rather is the study of language in general. It is the study
of the essential
nature of any human language.
The questions that linguists
ask are such as the following:
- How do linguistic structures relate to the
sounds we utter, and how
do these relate to the meaning that we express?
- What is the structure of these sounds, and
how are they articulated?
- How can children master language as quickly
as they do, even
though the number of sentences in a language appears to be infinitely
many?
- What does this remarkable capacity tell us
about the mind?
- How does human language differ from the communication
systems of animals?
- How does language change through time?
- By what process does a language diverse into
two mutually incomprehensible
languages, as did Latin into Rumanian and French and Proto-Arawak
into
Garifuna and modern Arawak?
- How can the prehistory of a language be reconstructed?
The Linguistics Department is
concerned with these as with related, more practical questions:
- How can a language best be taught and learned?
- How can it best be translated?
- What is involved in the ability to read and
write?
- How does one invent a practical orthography
(alphabet and spelling system)
for a language?
- How does language relate to other facets of
culture and society?
- What sorts of problems develop when language
doesn't work
as it should, such as in various language disorders?
- How do computer scientists use linguistic descriptions
for natural
language understanding systems?
The department
offers three undergraduate majors:
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