Factsheet Linguistics

FACTSHEET

RESEARCH MASTER’SPROGRAMME LINGUISTICS

Utrecht hosts a broad and vibrant community of people working in language sciences. We extend a warm welcome to you - new members of that community, and we are happy that you have chosen to do your Master’s at Utrecht University!

You have two years of linguistic discoveries ahead of you, and we hope you will enjoy every moment of it. We offer a broad programme that is well structured, yet offers you many choices to specialise in the subdiscipline of linguistics that you are interested in. You will get challenging classes taught by top researchers. You will be exposed to many new academic insights that are freely accessible through our university library. You will get access to our extensive lab facilities, where you will develop and apply your research skills. You will get the opportunity to develop your research profile in the thriving and well-connected research environment of the Utrecht Institute for Language Sciences (ILS). But most importantly, you will meet kindred spirits, junior and senior researchers from all over the world, who share with you a love for language and languages.

Rick Nouwen RMA Linguistics Programme coordinator

D R . R ICK N OUWEN is Associate Professor, lecturing in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. He is the coordinator of the Research Master.

DO YOU WANT TO GET INVOLVED?

There are plenty of opportunities to build your cv and gain valuable experience in the programme and in academic life.

Curriculum Committee

One way to be actively involved is by being the Linguistics student representative on the Curriculum Committee, which is tasked with reviewing course evaluations, discussing the quality of the programme, and making recommendations for improvement. If you are interested, you can contact the programme coordinator Rick Nouwen (R.W.F.Nouwen@uu.nl).

Humanities Graduate School Conference

You are encouraged to participate in the annual Humanities Graduate School Conference, which is organised by and for Research Master’s and PhD students at the Faculty of Humanities. The conferences provides a venue for interdisciplinary exchange within the Graduate School. Furthermore, the conference allows students and PhDs to obtain valuable experience in presenting and discussing their own work.

Research Master’s students are encouraged to participate in international conferences. To stimulate this participation, the Graduate School of Humanities awards several Conference Grants over the course of the year.

If you are interested in co-organising the Humanities Graduate School Conference and/or if you want more information about the Conference Grants, send an email to the Graduate School of Humanities: GSHumanities@uu.nl

THE TEAM OF LECTURERS

P ROF . DR . H ENRIETTE DE S WART is Professor of French linguistics and semantics. Her research focuses on crosslinguistic semantics, especially in the area of nominals, tense and aspect, negation. She has played a pioneering role in the development of cross-linguistic semantics and the use of semantic insights in analysing interaction and in linguistic typology.

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D R . I RIS M ULDERS is Assistant Professor in Linguistics and chair of the Research Master’s Curriculum Committee. She is particularly interested in sentence processing, the syntax-semantics interface, eye tracking, and teaches experiment design and data analysis. As the manager of the ILS lab she oversees students’ lab work during their internship and MA thesis.

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P ROF . DR . A OJU C HEN is Professor of Language Development in Relation to Socialisation and Identity. Her research in concerned with both fundamental research questions on phonetics, phonology and the prosody-pragmatics interface and the issue of how acquisition of such linguistic abilities in a first or second language interacts with the learner’s development into a socially functional individual in a familiar or new culture.

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P ROF . DR . S ERGEY A VRUTIN is Professor of Comparative Psycholinguistics. His research focuses on normal child language development and language impairment (aphasia) with special emphasis on the syntax-discourse interface and the application of information theory to the analyses of errors.

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STUDY ADVISORS

There are four study advisors for Linguistics. You can approach them when there are personal circumstances which might influence the progress of your study. Please contact the study advisor in a timely manner when you experience personal problems.

https://students.uu.nl/en/hum/linguistics/contact/study-advisor

THIS PROGRAMME

The very fact that we have and use languages is part of what makes us human. Many languages are spoken in the world. In the Research Master Linguistics, you get to reflect on the structure of languages and what drives language variation and change. Communication is a crucial ingredient of success in modern society. You will find out how children acquire their mother tongue, what is special about learning more languages, and the role language plays in communication. You will get to know more about the way language is processed in the brain, and what constitutes possible sources of language impairment. The key focus of the Research Master’s programme in Linguistics is on the cognitive faculties underlying human language, and their interaction.

The programme offers a training in theory driven empirical research with a broad focus on (1) theoretical linguistics (phonology, syntax, semantics), (2) psycholinguistics (language acquisition, language processing), (3) language use (discourse studies, phonetics, language variation, clinical linguistics). You will acquire a solid background in all domains, and then choose a series of elective courses to develop your research profile. You will receive training in empirical, computational, and experimental methodology. Under the supervision of senior researchers of the Utrecht Institute for Language Sciences (ILS), you will practice designing, planning, and carrying out an original research project during your internship and thesis work. Through the ILS international network, students can secure internships abroad if they wish to do so.

During the Research Master you acquire a broad understanding of the field of linguistics, and develop in-depth knowledge of a particular linguistics subdiscipline. You learn to apply your knowledge to new topics and to reflect critically on existing knowledge and current research. You acquire the academic, communication, and methodological skills that prepare you for carrying out your own research.

The Utrecht Research Master in Linguistics offers a solid foundation in the main areas of linguistics, combined with a wide range of elective courses that lead to specialisation in a subdiscipline of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics or language use. Our programme is unique in its combination of a broad theoretical orientation with solid computational and experimental methodological training.

The Master is well embedded in the international research community of ILS. This creates many possibilities for internships in leading research projects and individual supervision by top researchers. ILS has excellent lab facilities that students can use. We work closely with other linguistic institutes in the Netherlands in the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT), which widens your peer network through participation in LOT Summer and LOT Winter Schools.

WHAT SHOULD YOU EXPECT FROM US?

Challenging & cohesive high-quality RMA programme that prepares you not only to ‘Survive Linguistics’, but to thrive in it!

Closely linked teaching and research, theory and experimentation

Excellent, internationally renowned staff

International educational environment

Advanced experimental facilities & support staff (e.g. eye-tracking, EEG)

Many ongoing cutting edge research projects

Interdisciplinary: embedding in Neuroscience & Cognition (UU focus area),

Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (UU focus area) & Dynamics of Youth (UU strategic theme)

COURSE PLANNER: You will find more information on this programme’s courses in the Course Planner:

https://cursusplanner.uu.nl/e nglish/study/LN-OLIM-16

LEARNING

OBJECTIVES: S KILLS FOR LIFE IN & OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA

✓ Advanced academic general skills training - also crucial for policy advisor in language & education

✓ Academic skills of reading & digesting complex literature – guarantees growth in any profession

✓ Analytical skills (e.g. identify and analyse problems, propose solutions) – essential for higher management

✓ Communicative skills (e.g. communicate findings, proposals to specialists or non-specialists) – vital for communication advisor

✓ Digital skills (e.g. Python, corpus research, Praat) –necessary for IT companies, language & speech technology, linguistic annotation/databases

✓ Skills in quantitative methodology (e.g. experimental design, statistics, data analysis)lab manager, methods teacher

✓ High level knowledge on language: native/foreign language education, business communication, translation/interpretation, lexicography, language documentation (e.g. refugees, religious organisations)

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Our goal is to allow you to grow and develop by studying linguistics as a cognitive science in a multidisciplinary context, e.g. by exploring the relationship between linguistics & language studies, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy and logic, clinical work/research (patients), education (schools). Our teaching philosophy reflects our interests in dialogue and exchange of ideas. Our preference is for student-oriented teaching that promotes intellectual curiosity, learning, and growth by both students and teachers-researchers. We invite students to actively interact with the subject matter, their peers, and staff.

Our curriculum is organised in such a fashion that it first (year 1/semester 1 – compulsory courses) allows you a proper orientation in the field of linguistics and is followed by (year 1/semester 2) a range of advanced research-oriented courses within different tracks that allow you to move from breath of knowledge to deepen it, within the disciplinary or multidisciplinary contexts. Together with the thesis (year 2/second semester), the research master internship (year 2/semester 1) constitutes the individual trajectory of the student. During the internship, the focus is on research questions defined by the project the student is participating in. For the thesis, emphasis is placed on original research driven by the student's own questions. The exact activities/tasks, mode of working, schedule and expected outcomes may vary across thesis research projects, but they are all always agreed upon at the beginning of the thesis project.

We also welcome a degree of student input into curricula and we allow you to tailor-make your own educational path to suit your future plans and prospects. We provide you with a multitude of teaching and examination forms: lectures, take-home examinations, written assignment and examinations, project proposals, squibs, and papers, individual and group oral presentations.

THIS MASTER’S PROGRAMME AND OUR SOCIETY

The Research Master’s programme Linguistics prepares you for a broad range of jobs inside and outside academia that require academic skills, research methodology and advanced knowledge in the field of linguistics. Graduates of the programme are highly eligible to operate in the international field of linguistics research, be it in academia, industry, or government.

A multitude of career options: enter a PhD programme, carry out research at a research institute (e.g. university, UMC, Auris, Kentalis), find a job in industry/consulting, government (policy making), education, publishing and many more. If you decide to embark on a non-academic career, you are fully equipped to apply for junior research, consultancy, junior data scientist, and teaching positions where specialised knowledge, research abilities, and insight into the structure of language and its use are relevant. For example:

a traineeship in the field of language technology (speech recognition, text-tospeech)

an advisory position in first- and second-language teaching and policy making

a teaching position in higher education

a junior project research position in industry

an assistant position in experimental and computational lab

Career prospects: 50% of our students end up in a PhD position (in Utrecht/the Netherlands/the world). Within a year after graduation, the majority of our graduates find a job to grow and thrive further!

IMPORTANT FOR HUMANITIES STUDENTS

New students students.uu.nl/hum-new

Practical information for new students at the Humanities faculty.

Academic calendar students.uu.nl/hum-calendar

Information about days off, course registrations and change-of-enrolment days.

UU online

Information about our online systems and how to log in: students.uu.nl/hum-online In need of a manual? IT manuals: https://manuals.uu.nl/en

REGISTRATION, PROCEDURES, INTERNSHIP INFO

Student Information Desk Humanities students.uu.nl/hum-contact

Programme related matters, such as

• course registration

• course schedules

• study results & study progress (Osiris)

• graduation

Student Services students.uu.nl/en/contact/student-services

Studying at Utrecht University in general:

• registration as a UU student

• tuition fees

• elite athletes

• disability or chronic illness

Internship coordinator students.uu.nl/hum-internshipcoordinator

Information about:

• guidelines and procedures

• internship placements

QUESTIONS ABOUT ENTERING THE JOB MARKET

Career Services students.uu.nl/hum-careerservices

Advice on getting a job after graduation through workshops, CV check-up, and coaching. Your programme coordinator will inform you about programme-specific events.

NEED EXTRA HELP?

Study advisor: students.uu.nl/hum-studyadvisor

Student psychologist: students.uu.nl/psychologist

Workshops: Skills Lab: students.uu.nl/en-skillslab

THINKING OF GOING ABROAD?

International office Humanities: students.uu.nl/hum-io

OTHER FACILITIES

University Library: students.uu.nl/hum-library

Olympos sports centre: olympos.nl/en-us/home.aspx

Parnassos cultural centre: uu.nl/en/parnassos

FACT! You can find your grades, student card and timetable in the MyUU portal and the MyUU app: students.uu.nl/en/myuu and students.uu.nl/en/ myuu-app

FACT! In the second semester, you will have to register in Osiris for courses you wish to attend. If you want to switch courses, you can do so on the change-ofenrolment days before the start of the relevant block.

FACT! Deadlines are always listed in the course syllabus, which your lecturer will provide approximately 2 weeks prior to the course’s ’start.

FACT! If you need more information about specific aspects of your programme, e.g. internships or thesis, please see the Curriculum page on the programme website via students.uu.nl/hum

FACT! Check students. uu.nl/hum-studentlife for information about living, jobs, sports and leisure in Utrecht!

© June 2023. Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities. Every effort has been made to ensure that the information presented in this factsheet is correct and up to date. Utrecht University cannot be held liable for any false, inaccurate, or incomplete information presented herein.