The undergraduate linguistics program

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Walburga von Raffler-Engel

Abstract

When I studied linguistics thirty years ago, the subject was taught only on the graduate level. It was assumed that the student needed a background in anthropology, classics, or foreign languages before he would be ready to tackle the analysis of language qua language. Phonemic theory was approached after a thorough training in phonetics and a demonstrated ability to transcribe any language into IPA. The Ph.D. degree in General Linguistics required extensive field work. During the sixties the training of linguists changed radically from a social science empirical orientation to a strictly humanistic drill in logical thinking, an area largely covered by Philosophy Departments. (At Vanderbilt we have a strong Linguistics minor with the Ph.D. in Philosophy.) Field work was replaced by simple experiments in the psychology lab. The study of linguistics no longer needed extensive background in a subject matter and by itself became less time consuming. Eventually, it was possible to pursue an entire program in linguistics on the undergraduate level.

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