Welcome to the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
The Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics was created on 1 August 2011 by merging the former Department of Linguistics and the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics. The Department is part of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.
The Department pursues an interdisciplinary approach to theoretical and applied linguistics and avoids uncritical adherence to particular views and theories. Building on the strengths of the previous institutions, the new department covers a comprehensive range of the language sciences and offers excellent theoretical and empirical research in a broad spread of fields from historical linguistics and comparative syntax to language processing and computational linguistics. The aims of the Department are:
- to achieve excellence across a broad spectrum of linguistic research
- to provide high quality teaching informed by current research
- to foster a broad and integrated approach to the study of linguistics
The Department's staff includes many internationally known experts in their respective fields. Courses are offered both at undergraduate and MPhil levels, and the breadth of the Department is also reflected in PhD research.
Boundaries between subdisciplines of linguistics are highly permeable within and beyond the Department as reflected in the Department's Research Clusters and research projects, but also in collaborations of the Department's staff with members of other institutions within the University and in the fact that many linguists work in other Departments, Faculties and even Schools of the University. The Cambridge Language Sciences Initiative, an initiative by the University of Cambridge to make Language Sciences a strategic priority for institutional support, aims to bring all those researchers concerned with research into various aspects of the language sciences together. The Department is centrally embedded in the Initiative as it has the largest concentration of Linguists in one institution.
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