Welcome to the Linguistics Programme
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It is a 'foundation' discipline in the sense that it bridges the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities. Linguistics is an exciting field, not only because of its own achievements, but also because of its contributions to other fields. For example, linguistic anthropology is one of the four subdisciplines of anthropology, and it has provided models of rigour in cultural anthropology.
Linguistics also has links with cognitive science, computer science, education (through reading, child language acquisition, and classroom interaction), geography (through linguistic geography and dialectology), history (through historical linguistics), literature (through stylistics, poetics, and critical theory), neurology (through neurolinguistics, the study of how language functions in the brain), philosophy (through the philosophy of natural language, semantics, and logic), psychology (through psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and clinical applications), sociology (through sociolinguistics and the sociology of language), speech therapy, and zoology (through animal communication and the evolution of language).