The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara stands at the forefront of several converging trends in the field of linguistics, thanks to a series of key decisions made when the department was founded just two decades ago. UCSB Linguistics was created to realize a vision of linguistics as a field that would seek explanations for language through an understanding of how it is used by speakers as a fundamental human activity. From the beginning, the department committed itself to maintaining a sharp focus on the theoretical and methodological tools that would be needed to realize this vision, and to developing a broad empirical base for the work via a typologically diverse sampling of the world’s languages. As more and more researchers across all fields of linguistics are seeking well-motivated explanations and firmly grounded empirical evidence for claims about the nature of language, UCSB’s longstanding leadership in these areas puts the department at the forefront of cutting-edge linguistic scholarship. With its focus on analyzing patterns of linguistic structure, identifying patterns of language use, and theorizing the connections between them, over the last two decades UCSB has developed ideas and methods that are critical for moving the field of linguistics into a new era.

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