Department of Linguistics
The M.A. in Linguistics with a track in Language and Communication (MLC) will prepare students to use linguistics, especially the areas of discourse analysis (including narrative analysis and cross cultural communication) sociolinguistics, and pragmatics in the workforce. We envision a broad range of applications of the MLC in fields such as human resources, mediation and arbitration, technical and scientific writing, management, international communication, diversity training, counseling, advertising, marketing, usability testing, public relations, and media/ public opinion research. We will offer broad training in the analysis of language and communication, with possible foci on the following:
The study of how we use language to communicate in ways that interact with, and change, the external world, are studied in three subfields within Linguistics: Sociolinguistics, Discourse analysis, Pragmatics.
Sociolinguistics is concerned with language in social and cultural context, especially how people with different social identities (e.g. gender, age, race, ethnicity, class) speak and how their speech changes in different situations. Some of the issues addressed are how dialects (ways of pronouncing words, choice of words, patterns of words) cluster together to form personal styles of speech; why people from different communities or cultures can misunderstand what is meant, said and done based on the different ways they use language.
Discourse analysis focuses on language use 'above' the sentence (in text) and 'beyond' the sentence (in context). This perspective analyzes texts and contexts from a wide array of sites in everyday life, ranging, for example, from informal conversations among friends to doctor/patient interactions, office documents (memos, minutes), and televised political debates. Some of the issues addressed are the following: how texts build cohesion (the word and meaning relationships that 'hold' a text together) and coherence (the overall unity, topic, and message); how texts that tell a story (a narrative) differ from those that describe something, provide an explanation or list a set of instructions.
Pragmatics focuses on how speakers use language to present information and how hearers draw inferences from what is said about the speaker's communicative intention. Some of the issues addressed are how particular ways of speaking (including the choice of words, sentence forms, and prosody (intonation, rhythm, pitch)) convey subtle features of messages; how language conveys 'who did what, when, where, why, and how;' how we use language to accomplish 'speech acts' (e.g. apologies, declarations, requests, threats) that bring us closer together or take us further apart.
The MLC will provide students with general skills in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics and teach them how to use these skills to resolve concrete problems in workplace settings, institutions and professions that depend largely upon language to accomplish their goals. The foundation for the skills will be acquired through 4 Required courses; the use of the skills will be developed through Electives (see courses below).
The MLC has two different options for completion:
8 courses (24 credits) plus Master's Thesis
10 courses (30 credits)
Students will take 8- 10 courses depending on which option is pursued. To complete a Master's Thesis, the student must submit a proposal to his/her advisor and to the Graduate School. The thesis will be mentored by the faculty advisor with or without additional readers. Upon completion, the Master's Thesis must be deposited in the Graduate School.
Other than the first required course, there is flexibility in all course requirements.
Required
LING 401: General Linguistics (may be waived if student has a background in Linguistics)
3 additional courses, to be selected from the following:
Speech acts
Pragmatics
Discourse Analysis: Narrative
Discourse Analysis: Conversation
Approaches to Discourse
Cross/Intercultural communication
Introduction to Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistic Field Methods
Electives
4- 6 courses (depending on Master's Thesis option), to be selected from the above list (with permission from advisor) or from the following list:
Computational Tools for Linguists
Multimodal discourse
American Dialects
Corpus Linguistics
Linguistics in the professions
Language and the internet
Linguistics and writing
Approaches to discourse analysis
Variation analysis
Ethnography of communication
Statistics for Linguists
Language and law
Language and aging
Language and gender
Language and the media
Language and medical discourse
Intertextuality
Cross-disciplinary Discourse Analysis
Alternative courses, that reflect the needs and interests of individual students, may be selected under the guidance of the faculty advisor. They may include courses in other departments or schools within Georgetown, as well as courses at area universities (e.g. American, George Mason, George Washington) through the Washington Area Consortium of Universities.
Students may complete the course work for the MLC (depending on choice of curricular option and number of courses per semester) in one academic year.
Although the MLC has no language requirement, students wishing to enhance their skills in a language other than English are able to audit undergraduate language courses (with the proviso that they attend regularly and participate as active class members).
In addition to courses, we will provide at least one workshop and lecture per semester in areas relevant to the interests of the current MLC students. We will guarantee that some of the many talks in our regular Department of Linguistics Speaker Series are on topics interesting and accessible to the MLC students. All students may also use the resources of the MBNA Career Center (http://careerweb.georgetown.edu/) for career counseling and advice, to pursue internships, and to search for post-graduate employment.
Frequently Asked Questions about the Master's of Arts in Language and Communication