Comments on: I Am Not an English Major

By: Jon Boy

Jon Boy — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:22:08 +0000

Thanks.

By: Jessica Benet

Jessica Benet — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:38:21 +0000

I really like your English blog. Just so you know. I’m adding it to my RSS reader.

By: Jon Boy

Jon Boy — Fri, 26 May 2006 02:05:23 +0000

Deja vu. Have you asked before whether they’d let you double-major in linguistics and English language? I personally know of no reason why (generic) you couldn’t, but the required usage class might have kept (Katya) you from doing so.

I’d say that linguistics has a lot of subfields and is very interdisciplinary, if such a thing is possible. There seems to be a continuum shading from subfields like phonology to more interdisciplinary fields like speech pathology and the acoustics of speech.

Of course, this is all coming from someone who wasn’t a linguistics major.

By: Katya

Katya — Tue, 23 May 2006 23:05:36 +0000

I wonder if they let you do a double major in Linguistics and ELang? I would think not, but if none of the classes overlap . . . (Of course, I’d go nuts if I had to take a usage class. Are there any required usage classes?)

Would you say that linguistics has a lot of subfields or that it’s interdisciplinary? You could argue that English has a lot of subfields, in that two randomly selected professors of English are likely to have very different emphases, but those areas still aren’t likely to be closely related to any other disciplines, excepting maybe history. (Or linguistics.)

Linguistics, on the other hand, relates to aspects of physics, anatomy, psychology, neurology, education, computer science, artificial intelligence, information science, child development, literature, etc., etc.

By: Jon Boy

Jon Boy — Sat, 20 May 2006 02:05:54 +0000

The field of linguistics also has the problem of having a lot of subfields. Someone studying cognitive linguistics may have en entirely different course of study from someone studying historical linguistics.

The Elang and linguistics majors have a few electives in common, but the subject matter overlaps more than that. For the most part they’ve created new English-centric classes for the Elang major.

By: Katya

Katya — Fri, 19 May 2006 16:05:39 +0000

I’ve had similar problems with people not understanding what it means to be a linguistics major. They tend to think it’s the same as speaking a lot of languages. (Although that is one of the definitions of “linguist,” that’s not what linguistics as a field of study is about.) It also doesn’t help that linguistics curricula vary widely from school to school, so one person’s linguistics degree may reflect a strikingly different body of knowledge from another person’s.

I have to say I’m surprised that the English and ELang majors have so little overlap. I wonder how much ELang overlaps with linguistics?