Linguistics Program

Linguistics at Richmond is an interdisciplinary minor that studies the system of language as a medium of cognition and perception as well as a social institution. Engaging in linguistic analysis enables students to view culture through the lens of language. Language can be studied at multiple levels: phonetics and phonology (sounds), morphology (words), syntax (sentences), and semantics and pragmatics (meaning). Faculty at Richmond investigate each of these levels in courses that take different analytical perspectives: applied linguistics, computational linguistics, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics. These courses address a variety of topics, including language change, language and cognition, and language and society (gender, class, race/ethnicity).

Minor Requirements Courses Upcoming Courses

Feature Stories

UR Now: Student Experience

Diving into Richmond’s First-Year Seminars

Small classes, passionate professors, and skill-building exercises form the premise of this foundational program.

A photo of Jack Bricklemeyer and Dr. John Obeck in Obeck's dental office in Tampa, FL. Both are wearing blue scrubs and smiling at the camera.

University of Richmond Magazine

Five reasons an alum-supervised internship is the ideal summer

Spiders help Spiders when alumni host current students as interns. Here's how it pays dividends for everyone involved.

UR Now: University News

University recognized as a “Best College” by Princeton Review

Richmond earns high marks for academics and student experience, ranking in the top 10 for classroom experience, career services, health services, and dining.

UR Now: University News

Richmond Class of 2029 will soon arrive on campus

The University welcomes new Spiders who bring special talents, accomplishments, and a community mindset to UR. Meet three first-year students right now.

Faculty Highlights

Park publishes on ReSCORE: improving multi-hop QA retrieval

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "ReSCORE: Label-free Iterative Retriever Training for Multi-hop Question Answering with Relevance-Consistency Supervision" in the Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Park publishes on fine-tuning instructions for large language models (LLMs)

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "ArgInstruct: Specialized Instruction Fine-Tuning for Computational Argumentation" in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Lowder publishes on comparing lab and web-based settings

Matthew Lowder, associate professor of psychology, published "Comparing Sustained Attention Performance across Laboratory-Based versus Web-Based Settings" in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

Giancaspro published on studying abroad

David Giancaspro, associate professor of Spanish, published "Lost and found? Shifts in Heritage Speakers' Processing of Mood Morphology Over the Course of a Semester Abroad" in Languages.