Department of English
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English Language and Linguistics
Students in ELL may pursue a M.A., a Ph.D., or a graduate certificate in Natural Language Processing.
Contact Information:
Professor Mary Niepokuj
Director Program in English Language and Linguistics
Department of English
500 Oval Drive
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038 USA
E-mail: niepokuj@purdue.edu
The ELL Program concentrates on issues having to do with the nature of the English language, attending to aspects ranging from its descriptive and formal properties in phonology, syntax and semantics, to its more applied aspects, such as its usage in various historical, social, and literary contexts, as well as natural language processing. The strength of the ELL Program at Purdue lies in its interdisciplinarity and its ability to articulate connections with new and old fields alike. It offers opportunities for graduate students to develop unique and creative approaches to the study of English in its linguistic aspects. The ELL Program has strong links with other graduate programs in the English Department, including Medieval Literary Studies, Professional Writing, Rhetoric And Composition, and English as a Second Language. In particular, ELL graduate students have the opportunity to choose any of these areas as their secondary specialization and to conduct interdisciplinary research within the Department. Similarly, students in related programs can choose ELL as their secondary specialization, thus strengthening the linguistic component of their research and augmenting their teaching profiles. ELL also has close ties with Purdue's Linguistics Program in the College of Liberal Arts, allowing ELL students to take advantage of course offerings in general linguistics and to interact with students and faculty outside the Department.
The ELL program has a core of 5 faculty members who cover the areas of Syntax, Phonology, Semantics, History of English and Historical Linguistics. ELL also has two affiliated faculty in the area of Medieval Studies. ELL faculty conduct and supervise linguistic research using a variety of different methods, including textual analysis, natural language processing, field research, survey research, and corpus-based research, as well as several current theoretical frameworks.
The ELL Program's focus is on interdisciplinarity. Our goal for the next few years concentrates on creating new connections and strengthening our already existing ones with other programs in the Department, the School and the University.