I'm Tim Hunter, and I'm an assistant
professor in the Institute of Linguistics.
One-way people often described
linguistics is a study of languages,
and I think that's sorta half true,
but it's sorta only half the picture.
What we're really interested in
is what the psychological, sort of,
computations are
that underlay this ability we all have, to
speak out native language,
with little or no effort. We're interested in
the ways in which languages around the
world differ,
and also the ways that they don't. When
we find that they differ, then we know
that
mind must be flexible enough to
accommodate doing things this way, or
doing things that way.
English word order is very different
from Japanese word order. For us it's
interesting
because it means that when you take a
newborn child,
the mental machinery that they have,
is perfectly capable of developing into
a competent English speaker, or if they grow
up in Tokyo they're gonna
grow up to be in the state that we
call a competent Japanese speaker.
Although most people do end up speaking
the language spoken by their parents,
the particular language is not genetically passed
on. We know this because of people who get
adopted at very young ages,
and they speak whatever language they're
surrounded by. Having an interest in
analytical thinking and logical puzzle
solving
is probably more of a clue that you're gonna
like linguistics than
is enjoying learning foreign languages. Linguistics is
very much
a science, it's in some ways closely
related to
other sciences like psychology, or even
biology.
There's some part of the mind or brain
that is embodying this subconscious
knowledge we have of language.
We apply the scientific method, we construct certain hypotheses, say maybe your brain
works this way,
maybe the rules you have in your
mind for putting together sentences
work this way or the other way, and we try
to bring together a bunch of words
that would be expected to be good, if your
brain worked that way. We see if it
actually sounds good or actually sounds bad.
Linguistics is something that most
people, or at least a lot of people who end up
majoring in linguistics,
discovered relatively late
in their college career. There on that
many people who come out of high school
thinking,
"yes linguistics, that's what I want to do". People
tend to discover it at some point over
the first
couple of years. We have a lot of people who
take
the introduction to linguistics course, thinking that
thinking that it  might be the only course they take in
linguistics, or not really know much about
it,
and then end up converting to the major.
The linguistics department here, or the Institute of
Linguistics is very small, there only a
handful a faculty members, and so I think
one thing that a lot of the students like about
doing a linguistics major, is that
they're taking courses again with the
same professors, and so they really get to
know them quite well,
and the professors get to know the students
quite well so at the start of the
semester,
you have some sort of expectation of how each
other works,
you not getting to know a professor from
scratch every semester,
I think a lot of students like that.
