Programme Overview
Programme Overview
The programme is hosted by the School of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities. Our programme is one of the few MA programmes in theoretical linguistics that includes a strong interdisciplinary component and explains its relation to linguistics and language description: such as acoustic phonetics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The programme suggest courses in mixed format: students who do not live in Moscow and cannot come to Moscow for financial or other reasons, may take courses online, while other students are in the classroom. More details on our curriculum are available here.
Our academic and research activities include:
- introduction our students to language diversity and to field studies of minority languages and dialects
- studies of language variation and change
- studies of Russian grammar and lexicon, as well as Russian Sign Language, in a typological perspective
- introduction to the basics of the formal language modeling
- discussions about language, field research and linguistic experiment from the interdisciplinary point of view – teaching psycholinguistics and linguistic anthropology
- work with electronic corpora of different languages, as well as building them
- teaching methods of linguistic data processing, statistic analysis and visualization, in R and Python
- basics of instrumental phonetic analysis
- help with conceiving and carrying out one’s own linguistic project
The programme has research partnerships with University of Tromsø, University of Heslinki, University of Stockholm, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Pavia. Every year we organize guest lectures by linguistics from Europe and the US (see here and here). Or see a less formal advertisement of the programme.
Several reasons why you will enjoy staying with us:
- we tell you about what we do ourselves...
- ...and if we tell you about anything else, it is interesting to ourselves
- you will carry out your own research projects – becoming part of the modern linguistics yourselves
- we go on linguistic field trips, and the best of you may join us
- we are joyful and relatively young (as of 2019)
- ...also, School of Linguistics celebrates, goes to the open air etc.
How to join us:
Prepare a portfolio that shows your personal and academic achievements and write a vigorous motivation letter that explains why you desperately need to study at our programme. Or simply win our Competition in Theoretical Linguistics. For more details on enrolling in the programme visit this page.