General Linguistics concerns itself with fundamental questions about the nature of language and its relationship to other human faculties. It considers language as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon. Descriptive Linguistics studies how languages are structured through research on a wide variety of languages. Second Language Acquisition draws on various fields to describe how second languages are learned by individuals in different contexts and to explain the underlying biological, cognitive, and social mechanisms. Sociolinguistics focuses on how social situations affect language and language attitudes. Psycholinguistics explores linguistic competence and performance through the psychological processes involved in representing, comprehending, and producing speech and language acquisition.

1. General and Descriptive Linguistics
General Linguistics
Linguistics concerns itself with the fundamental questions of what language is and how it is
related to other human faculties. In answering these questions, linguists consider language as a
cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon and seek to determine what is unique in
languages, what is universal, how language is acquired, and how it changes. Linguistics is,
therefore, one of the cognitive sciences; it provides a link between the humanities and the social
sciences, as well as education and hearing and speech sciences.
Descriptive Linguistics
Descriptive linguistics is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages are structured.
Research is undertaken in a wide variety of languages. We also offer a graduate program in
Hispanic linguistics. This long-standing program incorporates a broad area of research and
training in this growing and dynamic field.
Second Language Acquisition
The study of second language acquisition (SLA) is an increasingly interdisciplinary field that
draws on various branches of linguistics as well as cognitive psychology, educational research,
sociology, and neurology to describe exactly how second languages are learned by different
individuals in different contexts, and to explain the biological, cognitive, and social mechanisms
underlying these phenomena. Factors commonly studied include the role of instruction, age,
aptitude, native language, universal grammar, communicative practice, and sociolinguistic
context.
Other students may wish to pursue a certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages (TESOL) in the Department of Linguistics.
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics at Pitt focuses on how social situations affect language and language attitudes,
how these can affect the way a language is spoken, and how social meaning is expressed through
language. We attempt to answer questions such as:
How do people's identity affect the way they speak, and how does the way they speak
"create" their identity?
What happens to languages and their speakers when people of different language
backgrounds find themselves living and working in the same community?

2. How can governments and institutions maintain or revitalize languages, while at the same
time maintaining effective communication in a community?
How do attitudes and ideologies about language affect the way a language is spoken?
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is a branch of linguistics and psychology that explores linguistic competence
and performance. Some of the major research interests of psycholinguists are the psychological
processes involved in representing or encoding speech, comprehending and producing speech,
and language acquisition. To study these processes, we utilize a variety of methodologies and
theoretical orientations. Our department specializes in first and second language acquisition,
sentence processing, speech perception, and cognitive psychology applied to second language
acquisition.