UC Santa Barbara PhD program

[Sandra Thompson]

Apologies for cross-posting.

Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara

The Department of Linguistics at UCSB offers a Ph.D. program with a 
functional theoretical orientation and a strong commitment to the principle 
that linguistic theory should be based on language use. We seek 
explanations for the linguistic structures of the world's languages in 
discourse and interaction, the sociocultural, cognitive, and physical 
forces shaping language use, and the ways in which these forces motivate 
language change.

Our recently restructured graduate program offers Ph.D. tracks in 
structural, sociocultural, cognitive, and corpus linguistics. Following a 
rigorous two-year Master's program including courses in all four areas, 
students take doctoral-level courses in their chosen track, with 
flexibility reflecting their individual interests, and advance to Ph.D. 
candidacy by the end of their fourth year. Training in empirical 
methodologies is an essential component of our program; in addition to 
Master's level courses in discourse transcription and basic statistics for 
linguistics, each Ph.D. track features relevant methods courses, such as 
field methods, sociocultural methods, and advanced statistics.

Our department has a strong tradition of language documentation and 
description and, in addition to field methods, offers courses in typology, 
language contact, grammar writing, and documentary linguistics. The 
department also has an international reputation in sociocultural 
linguistics, a broadly interdisciplinary specialization originating at UCSB 
that encompasses the traditional fields of sociolinguistics, linguistic 
anthropology, socially oriented discourse analysis, and related areas. We 
now offer a corpus linguistics track that gives students in-depth training 
on how to transcribe, annotate, and retrieve corpus data, how to compile a 
corpus, and how to analyze corpus data of different types using the most 
current statistical techniques. Our cognitive track provides training in 
the cognitive and psycholinguistic underpinnings of language, including 
language acquisition, production, and comprehension, as well as advanced 
statistical analysis.

We welcome applications to our graduate program. Be sure to note our 
application deadline of December 1. UCSB offers four- and five-year central 
fellowships to qualified applicants; smaller awards are also available.

Please visit our website-www.linguistics.ucsb.edu-for further information 
about our graduate program, faculty, research specializations, and language 
areas.