Bachelor in Linguistics
Appleton, USA
Bachelor's degree
DURATION
4 years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
EARLIEST START DATE
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
Key Summary
About: Lawrence University offers a Bachelor in Linguistics at a private residential liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Wisconsin. The program examines language acquisition and how language and thought interact, showing how mental messages become sounds and symbols that create meaning. Students often pair linguistics with majors across humanities, science, languages, and music. The college enrolls about 1,500 undergraduates with 15% international students.
Career Outcomes: Graduates pursue careers in foreign service, speech-language therapy, software and tech (natural language processing, speech recognition), education, consulting, business, government, law, medicine. And advanced study in linguistics, cognitive science, computer science, and TESL. Keywords: linguistics, language acquisition, semantics, syntax, sociolinguistics, NLP, speech recognition.
How do children learn a language? How does language shape think—and how does thought shape language?
Linguistics—which studies the structure of language—scientifically examines how we create messages in our minds, and how we put together sounds and symbols to convey those messages in ways that create meaning and understanding for ourselves and others.
Lawrentians sometimes pair linguistics with
- Anthropology
- Cognitive science
- Computer science
- English
- Government
- History
- Languages: Chinese, Classics, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish
- Math-Computer Science
- Music performance
- Philosophy
Components of the Major
- Introduction to Linguistics
- Two of the following introductory courses: Lexical Semantics; Syntax; Phonology; or Morphology
- Two of the following: Philosophy of Language; How to Do Things With Words; Topics in Logic; Cognitive Linguistics
- Four electives from linguistics or computer science
- Additional language study
- Linguistics Senior Seminar
The Chandler Senior Experience
For your Senior Experience, you will complete your senior seminar in linguistics along with an independent study that you can complete with a faculty advisor over one, two, or three terms (based largely on your research needs). Your linguistics Senior Experience will culminate in a research paper and oral presentation to faculty and students. Linguistics majors with double-majors in other fields (e.g., language, anthropology or psychology), typically combine their interests into one Senior Experience. (One particularly creative student completed a project that served as his senior experience for three majors: music theory, Russian studies, and linguistics.)
Recent Senior Experiences include:
- Native and non-native perceptions of pre-velar /æ/-raising in Wisconsin English
- English-Spanish Code-switching in Bilingual Blogs: Patterns among native English speakers living abroad
- What Did You Call That? An Examination of English Names Transliterated into Chinese
- Machine Translation in the Connectionist Framework
- Dajare: A Linguistic Analysis of Japanese Wordplay
- Conceptual Metaphor and Framing in the State of the Union and Republican Rebuttal
- Shakespeare in Russian: Problems and Solutions in Cross-Cultural Translation
- Courtroom Narratives: The Lawyers as Storytellers
- Gender Differences in Scientific Writing
Life After Lawrence
Lawrentians can enjoy careers in
Foreign service, speech-language therapy, software engineering and technology (e.g., natural language processing, speech recognition), education (secondary and higher ed), consulting, business, government, law, medicine
Recent employers include
Accenture, Epic Systems, French Cultural Embassy, Minneapolis Public Schools, UNISYS, Apple, Teach for America, Broadcast Interactive Media, VoiceBox Technologies, Waseda University, IBM, U.S. Department of Defense
Lawrentians can earn advanced degrees in
Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Law, Physical science, English, Computer Science, Teaching English as a Second Language
Recent schools include
Iowa, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Princeton, Wisconsin
You might enjoy this if you're interested in
- How language works, including syntax, phonetics, word origins, and grammar
- Analyzing and studying how and why people use language the way they do
- Experiencing and studying languages in different contexts, cultures, and countries
- Diagramming sentences written in unfamiliar languages
