Linguistics Home
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, when Plato wrote about the nature of language in the Cratylus, people have attempted the systematic study of language in order to discover the fundamental ways languages are alike and how they are different.Modern linguistics has developed analytical techniques and instrumentation which provide evidence for the claim that language is hierarchical and systematic on various levels: sounds, words, sentences, prosody, pragmatics. Considered by some to be the "window of the mind," language is perhaps the most salient of human characteristics, and worthy of extended study.
Undergraduate and graduate students at Texas A&M can take a variety of classes which will ground them in the concepts and techniques of linguistic analysis. Topics covered in linguistics courses range from how speech sounds are produced to how people tell stories; from the history of the Indo-European languages to the distinctive speech patterns of contemporary Texans; from the development of new words in English to the development of new languages in children and foreign language learners.