Department of Linguistics

Director of the M.A. in Linguistics with a concentration in Language and Communication: Dr. Deborah Schiffrin

Assistant Director: Dr. Anna Marie Trester

Please take a look at the new MLC website (still currently under development)

MLC Brochure in PDF format.

• Career Resources
• Contact Information
• Current MLC Students and Alumni
• Frequently Asked Questions
• MLC events
• Professional Applications of Linguistics
• Program Requirements

The MLC program features an individualized curriculum that develops skills in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics, which can be applied in fields such as human resources, international communication, diversity training, counseling, advertising, business strategic communications, marketing, branding, usability testing, media/public opinion research.  Additionally, the MA prepares students for work in the professions, including:

• Education: diversity in the classroom, multi-modal communication, assessment
• Health care: doctor/patient communication; medical, science and health writing 
• Law: legal writing; interpretation of statutes and contracts; criminal investigations

MLC students participate in professional socialization events and career education activities targeted for sociolinguists.  This personalized career development is designed to enable students to articulate how their skills and training are of particular value in workplace settings, institutions, and professions which depend largely upon language to accomplish their goals.

This program is designed for:

• College graduates with B.A. or B.S., with majors including, but not limited to, humanities and social sciences
• College graduates seeking further credentials for medical, law or, business school
• Members of the workforce (public and private sectors) who seek advancement

The study of how we use language to communicate in ways that interact with, and change, the external world, are studied in three subfields within Linguistics: Sociolinguistics, Discourse analysis, Pragmatics.

Sociolinguistics is concerned with language in social and cultural context, especially how people with different social identities (e.g. gender, age, race, ethnicity, class) speak and how their speech changes in different situations. Some of the issues addressed are how dialects (ways of pronouncing words, choice of words, patterns of words) cluster together to form personal styles of speech; why people from different communities or cultures can misunderstand what is meant, said and done based on the different ways they use language.

Discourse analysis focuses on language use 'above' the sentence (in text) and 'beyond' the sentence (in context). This perspective analyzes texts and contexts from a wide array of sites in everyday life, ranging, for example, from informal conversations among friends to doctor/patient interactions, office documents (memos, minutes), and televised political debates. Some of the issues addressed are the following: how texts build cohesion (the word and meaning relationships that 'hold' a text together) and coherence (the overall unity, topic, and message); how texts that tell a story (a narrative) differ from those that describe something, provide an explanation or list a set of instructions.

Pragmatics focuses on how speakers use language to present information and how hearers draw inferences from what is said about the speaker's communicative intention. Some of the issues addressed are how particular ways of speaking (including the choice of words, sentence forms, and prosody (intonation, rhythm, pitch)) convey subtle features of messages; how language conveys 'who did what, when, where, why, and how;' how we use language to accomplish 'speech acts' (e.g. apologies, declarations, requests, threats) that bring us closer together or take us further apart.

 

For more info on the MLC, please see:
Frequently Asked Questions about the Master's of Arts in Language and Communication

For application requirements please visit our admissions page. For more details on the curriculum, see Academic Programs.