phd in historical linguistics

Historical Linguistics. The Department of Linguistics offers two secondary fields, one in Historical Linguistics and the other in Linguistic Theory, for linguistics graduate students and for graduate students not enrolled in the linguistics Ph.D program.

Many graduate students in the Classics, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and other language-centered departments take courses in historical linguistics as part of their ordinary preparation for the Ph.D.

Historical linguistics is the scientific study of how languages change over time, which seeks to understand the relationships among languages and to reconstruct earlier stages of languages.

Additional information on the graduate program is available from the Department of Linguistics, and requirements for the degree are detailed in Policies. Areas of Study. Historical Linguistics | Linguistic Theory | Unspecified.

Historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics in which an investigation of the history of languages is used to learn about how languages are related, how languages change, and what languages were like hundreds and even thousands of years ago — even before written records of a language.

The PhD in Linguistics at BU aims to produce scholars who are versatile enough to be experts in both of these aspects of linguistic inquiry, yet skilled enough to do cutting-edge research in a particular subfield of the discipline.

The Ph.D. program in Linguistics at Penn embraces a wide range of theoretical specializations and methodologies. What unites them is a commitment to careful and explicit formal analysis of the human capacity for learning and using language.

Steve Dworkin is a historical Romance linguist, with a special emphasis on processes of lexical change. Ben Fortson specializes in Indo-European linguistics. Acrisio Pires, primarily a formal syntactician, investigates syntactic change in connection with language acquisition.

Graduate. Harvard began offering higher degrees in "comparative philology," as historical linguistics was then called, as early as the 1930's. By 1941, Harvard had a full-fledged Department of Comparative Philology, and a decade later this became the Department of Linguistics.

Jeff Good, PhD's research focuses on diachronic typology and the way historical change shapes synchronic grammars. He has done comparative-historical work on Benue-Congo languages, with a particular focus on Bantoid languages, as well as on the historical development of Saramaccan creole.