Welcome!

The field of linguistics refers to the scientific study of languages and the sub-disciplines of language form, meaning, and context. Language is one common area associated with this discipline. However, some other common topics include the history of language, culture, linguistic theory, and research methodology.

We offer an interdisciplinary linguistics minor, as well as linguistics concentrations in the English MA program and English PhD program.

Career Paths

Graduates with a degree in Linguistics provide a valuable lens for understanding language in an indefinite number of fields. For example, linguists have career opportunities in places, such as journalism, publishing, history centers, translation and language organizations, and more.  The following examples illustrate the services linguists provide.

The following is a partial list of the different jobs within linguistics:

• • English as a Second Language teacher
  • Lexicographer
  • Copy editor
  • Speech and language therapist
  • Translator

Core linguistics faculty

• • Min-Joo Kim (PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Full Professor. Areas include semantics, syntax, and their interface; formal pragmatics and language acquisition
  • Aaron Braver (PhD, Rutgers University, New Brunswick) Associate Professor. Areas include phonetics, phonology, and their interface; laboratory phonology; incomplete neutralization; sub- and supra-phonemic distinctions

Related Faculty in the English Department

• • Ken Baake (PhD, New Mexico State University) Technical communication, rhetoric of science, metaphor
  • Julie Nelson Couch (PhD, Brown University) Middle English language and literature, medieval studies, romance
  • Brian McFadden (PhD, University of Notre Dame) Old English language and literature, history of English

Faculty in Other Departments

There are a significant number of linguistics and language-related faculty at the university in many different departments. Many of these professors regularly teach courses that can be used toward the various undergraduate and graduate programs in linguistics on campus, including those administered by the Dept. of English.

Classical and Modern Literatures and Languages

• • Stefanie Borst (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) German linguistics, technology in language instruction
  • Erin Collopy (PhD, University of Washington) Russian, Russian linguistics
  • Stephen Corbett (PhD, Purdue) Spanish
  • Idoia Elola (PhD University of Iowa) Second language writing, Spanish linguistics
  • Greta Gorsuch (EdD, Temple University) Applied linguistics; Language testing, research methodology, curriculum and course design
  • James Lee (PhD, UT Austin) Second language acquisition
  • Kristen Michelson (PhD, University of Arizona) Second language acquisition, pedagogical and technological innovations in foreign language teaching and learning
  • Meixiu Zhang (PhD, Northern Arizona University) Second language pedagogy, second language writing, corpus linguistics

TTU Health Sciences

• • James Dembowski (PhD, University of Wisconsin at Madison) Acoustic and articulatory phonetics, speech disorders
  • Sue Ann Lee (PhD, UT-Austin) First and second language acquisition, phonetics, bilingualism

College of Education

• • Zenaida Aguirre-Muñoz (PhD, UCLA) Bilingual education, testing
  • Alfredo Benavides (PhD, Michigan State University) Bilingual education
  • Eva Midobuche (EdD, Texas A&M University) Bilingual education
  • Comfort Pratt (PhD, Louisiana State University) Spanish & Portuguese, Applied Linguistics

College of Engineering

• • Nelson Rushton (PhD, University of Georgia) Computer Science, neural network implementations of predicate logic, information retrieval, semantic web
  • Michael Gelfond (PhD, Steklov Mathematical Institute) Knowledge representation and reasoning, logic programming, answer set programming

Communication

• • Patrick Hughes (PhD, University of Denver) Intercultural communication, interpersonal communication

Philosophy

• • David Boylan (PhD, MIT) formal semantics and pragmatics, philosophical logic and epistemology
  • Christopher Hom (PhD, University of California at Irvine) Philosophy of language and linguistics, epistemology, metaphysics
  • Joel Velasco (Ph.D., B.A. University of Wisconsin, Madison) Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Science, and Epistemology

Psychology

• • Yi-Yuan Tang (PhD, Dalian University of Technology & Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) Neuroimaging (fMRI/PET/EEG), cognitive, affective and social neuroscience, computational neuroscience
  • Roman Taraban (PhD, Carnegie Mellon University) Psycholinguistics, cognition, connectionist modeling, reading comprehension

Contact

Aaron Braver
Program Director
aaron.braver@ttu.edu

Diane Johnson
Undergraduate Advisor
english.undergradadvisor@ttu.edu