Areas of Interest

Computational Linguistics

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. It includes computational modeling of linguistic phenomena and the use of computational techniques to process natural language for research purposes and practical applications.

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Corpus Methods

Corpus linguistics is a rapidly growing methodology that uses the statistical analysis of large collections of written or spoken data (corpora) to investigate linguistic phenomena.

Historical Linguistics

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. At UGA, our primary focus is on historical Indo-European linguistics – the history and development of the…

Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the ability to comprehend and produce language, either as their first or second (third, etc.) language. The study of language acquisition provides evidence for theoretical linguistics and has practical applications in language pedagogy.…

Language Documentation

Language documentation aims to capture and preserve the linguistic practices of a given community through audio and video recording, transcription, and annotation. It describes the grammar of endangered language varieties and how these varieties are used.

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds as physical entities (their articulation, acoustic properties, and how they are perceived), and phonology is the study of the organization and function of speech sounds as part of the grammar of a language. The perspectives of these two closely related…

Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis involve the study of language in its contexts of use. Pragmatics focuses on the effects of context on meaning, and Discourse Analysis studies written and spoken language in relation to its social context.

Image of a brain with many different words contained within the different sections describing various sensations, actions, and thought processes

Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of how language is used and represented in the mind, and how other cognitive capacities support language processing. Neurolinguistics is the study of how the brain enables representation and processing of language. Both fields use experimental and statistical…

Diagram of people and representations of conversations in speech bubbles using several icons

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in language, including the logical aspects of meaning (formal semantics), word meanings and their relations (lexical semantics), and the cognitive structure of meaning (conceptual semantics).

Map of the united states with different regions classifications

Sociolinguistics and Language Variation

Sociolinguistics and Language Variation involve the study of how language varies among different groups of speakers and the relationship of this variation to social factors. The examination of the reciprocal effects of social organization and social contexts on language use and the exploration of…

Syntax and Morphology

Syntax is the study of sentence structure, its relationship to meaning, and theoretical models that account for the ability of speakers to generate an infinite number of novel utterances. Morphology is the study of word structure and its relationship both to sentence structure and to meaning.…

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