Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics

Overview

Linguistics is the study of language in all its aspects. In British English, the word ‘philology’ denotes the historical study of language. Phonetics is the study of speech.

The faculty will provide you with an environment where a strong philological tradition is sustained while all core areas of linguistic theory are supported (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics), from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The faculty also has a strong profile in teaching and research on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.

Teaching and research in linguistic subjects is centred around the faculty’s home in The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, located on Walton Street. Most graduate courses in linguistics and philology are held in the building.

The Phonetics Laboratory has excellent provision for research in speech physiology and acoustics, and outstanding computing facilities. Currently, the Phonetics Laboratory's main areas of research are:

• prosody and speech timing, especially;
• contact phonetics and prosody;
• geolinguistic variation;
• multimodal analysis of gesture and prosody; and
• functional phylogenetic and other statistical- computational methods of reconstructing speech from the past.

Languages of particular interest in the faculty's research projects are: Indian English and other languages in India and the diaspora; Italo Romance (especially Venetian); languages of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Research in the Language and Brain Laboratory covers all aspects of linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The laboratory contains offices for postdoctoral researchers, research assistants and DPhil students working in Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics.