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

STUDENT EXPERIENCE

Graduating Spiders share their special memories and future plans

Six members of the Class of 2025 reflect on their UR experiences.

Yvonne Donkor and Chelsea Waruzi created an online map that include the Westhampton Green

Student Experience

A&S students mapped a way to experience the natural beauty at UR

What began as a class project has evolved into an online resource that details outdoor spaces on campus for studying, exercising, meditating, or simply wandering.

Rankings News

University of Richmond Named to Peace Corps’ List of 2025 Top Volunteer-Producing Colleges and Universities

University of Richmond is ranked No. 5 in the top small schools’ category among Peace Corps’ 2025 Top Volunteer-Producing Colleges and Universities list.

University News

University of Richmond seniors celebrate the past four years and look toward the future

This year’s Commencement ceremony offered the Class of 2025 a time to reflect and embrace change. Speakers emphasized the need to be present and resilient while leading lives of purpose.

Faculty Highlights

Park publishes paper on improving performance of large language models

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "tRAG: Term-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Zero-shot Retrieval" in Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).

Park publishes on boosting QA scoring accuracy

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "Return of EM: Entity-driven Answer Set Expansion for QA Evaluation" in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING).

Park publishes on how AI can personalize answers using Reddit

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "AdvisorQA: Towards Helpful and Harmless Advice-seeking Question Answering with Collective Intelligence" in Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).

Park publishes paper on training large language models

Joonsuk Park, associate professor of computer science, published the paper "Are LLM-Judges Robust to Expressions of Uncertainty? Investigating the effect of Epistemic Markers on LLM-based Evaluation" in the Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).