Our internationally-renowned Linguistics department at Rutgers–New Brunswick stands at the center of work in Phonology (including learnability), Syntax (specifically, Generative Grammar), Morphology, and Semantics and its interface with Pragmatics. Our department has a strong experimental core and laboratory culture investigating Language Acquisition and Development, and each of the subfields mentioned above. A number of our faculty members are actively engaged in fieldwork and language documentation around the world.
Our research areas and courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels feature theoretically-informed approaches to Computational Learning and Parsing, Language Acquisition, and the Philosophy of Language. At the undergraduate level, we have a linguistically-informed Speech and Hearing Sciences component integrated into our curriculum. Throughout all of this research is the goal of understanding how natural languages are acquired, understood, and used in discourse, and discovering the nature of the uniquely human endowment that underlies all these abilities.
Our language specialties include Romance, Germanic, Central Asian and/or Turkic (esp. Kazakh and Uyghur), Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Nilotic languages (esp. Kipsigis), Niger-Congo languages (esp. Yoruba, Atlantic and Bantu subfamilies), Dravidian, and Amerindian (esp. Mohawk).
Some of our faculty are active in the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Many of our faculty and students enjoy productive collaborations with members of other departments, including Philosophy, Spanish & Portuguese, Psychology, and the Center for African Studies.