The UCSB Linguistics faculty share a commitment to asking why languages are as they are. This fundamental question drives the pursuit of functional explanation. UCSB linguists have consistently encouraged the integration of theoretical insights and empirically grounded research findings from multiple domains of language, building a profound synergy within the department. The result is a department that works together across subdisciplinary and disciplinary boundaries to achieve a deeper understanding of how all the elements of language work together for their users.

The three fundamental premises on which the UCSB Linguistics Department was founded play an indispensable role in creating a unified vision of linguistics, establishing connections between linguistic structure, language use, and functional explanation.

Linguistic Structure

Linguistics at UCSB emphasizes the skills needed to document any language in the world, so researchers are able to analyze the full range of structures that are regularly encountered in the world’s languages. Structural analyses involve typologically, genetically, and areally diverse languages and focus on phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse, as well as the interactions among these levels. In graduate training, the goal is to build students’ confidence in their ability to analyze any language they encounter in its own terms, while at the same time maintaining a sophisticated awareness of how the structures at hand fit into the typological panorama of the world’s languages.

Language Use

UCSB’s perspective on language is empirically grounded in the use of language in real-life interactions. Linguists at UCSB foreground the central importance of discourse—the use of language in its communicative and interactional context—as the foundation of any linguistic analysis. A focus on language use yields insights into the patterning of linguistic structures in discourse, and into the communicative, cognitive, interactional, and sociocultural functions that such patterns serve. Discourse also represents the arena where processes of grammaticization arise that both motivate linguistic structures and drive language change.

Functional Explanation

The theoretical orientation of linguistics at UCSB leads to a search for empirically based explanations that anchor the facts of linguistic structure in the purposes for which speakers use language. UCSB linguists are committed to exploring the integration of linguistic structure and language use, recognizing both as essential to any explanation of how languages come to be as they are. In this perspective, grammaticization—the process through which new grammatical structure arises—plays a central role in accounting for cross-linguistic generalizations. The grammaticization paradigm motivates a fundamental shift in thinking about language universals, relocating the domain of theoretical generalization about language from claims about a possibly universal grammar toward the identification of general principles of grammaticization. By identifying these principles, UCSB linguists seek to understand the processes that constrain the emergence of linguistic structure, accounting for the observable regularities in the world’s languages while acknowledging their diversity, flexibility, and capacity for change.