LINGUISTICS at
Rutgers involves research and training in all areas of the modern discipline.
The department is a center of work in Optimality Theory and hosts a
group of syntacticians pursuing the Minimalist Program. The semantics
faculty have strong interests in the syntax-semantics interface and
in the formal-semantic issues raised by the structure of non-Western
languages. Close ties are maintained with the Rutgers Center for Cognitive
Science (RuCCS),
the Center for
African Studies, and with the university's Language
Institute.
Faculty interests range across the core areas of theoretical linguistics
and include computational learning and parsing, the psychology of language,
language acquisition, and the philosophy of language. Language specialties
include Romance, Germanic, South Asian (especially Hindi), Benue-Congo
(esp. Yoruba), Edo, Amerindian (esp. Mohawk), Hebrew, Haitian, Amazonian,
Greenlandic, and Slavic.
The graduate program has thirty students with a wide range of linguistic
and cognitive interests. Each year, the department is enriched by a
number of scholarly visitors: their specialties have included language
acquisition, typology, phonological theory, formal and lexical semantics,
Germanic and Romance syntax, and computational linguistics. A rotating
faculty position, of varying specialization, guarantees fresh input
from distinguished outside researchers.
