Welcome

The Rice Linguistics Department is the home of an active community of scholars with a wide range of interests. Broadly defined, the department adopts a functional, usage-based approach to language and linguistic theory. A number of recurrent themes emerge in faculty research and the degree programs offered: in-depth investigation of languages, coupled with the search for cross-linguistic generalization; the effects of semantics, language-in-use, sociocultural factors, and other functional influences that motivate and constrain linguistic form; grounding of theories in solid empirical data of many sorts; an interest in the relation between language and mind; and interest in discourse and social/communicative interaction more generally. These interests lead to intensive research activity in empirically well-supported theoretical and descriptive linguistics:

• cognitive/functional linguistics
• typology and language universals
• field studies in American Indian, Australian, Austronesian, African, and other languages
• sociolinguistics
• discourse studies
• phonetics and speech processing
• laboratory phonology
• neurolinguistics
• language change and grammaticization

Department History