LINGUISTICS at Rutgers involves research and training in all areas of the modern discipline. The department is a center of work in Optimality Theory and hosts a group of syntacticians pursuing the Minimalist Program. The semantics faculty have strong interests in the syntax-semantics interface and in the formal-semantic issues raised by the structure of non-Western languages. Close ties are maintained with the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS), the Center for African Studies, and with the university's Language Institute.

Faculty interests range across the core areas of theoretical linguistics and include computational learning and parsing, the psychology of language, language acquisition, and the philosophy of language. Language specialties include Romance, Germanic, South Asian (especially Hindi), Benue-Congo (esp. Yoruba), Edo, Amerindian (esp. Mohawk), Hebrew, Haitian, Amazonian, Kalaallisut, and Polynesian.