We offer a three-year supervised research route for students with a solid knowledge of existing research in the field and a good understanding of research methods.

We offer PhD supervision in descriptive and theoretical phonology, syntax, semantics, and morphology, with a particular emphasis on cross-linguistic variation and interfaces between different areas of grammar. Research in our department has covered a wide range of the world’s languages, including languages from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe. We are especially interested in fieldwork-based and community-oriented work on understudied languages and linking empirical data to theoretical generalisations.

Examples of PhD projects which our students have undertaken include a comparative study of the phonological processes in Syrian and Jordanian Arabic, the nature of English wh-interrogatives, verb alternation and affixes in Malay and Indonesian, and the syntax of conditional sentences in Syrian Arabic. Many of our former PhD students work in higher education institutions around the world, as teachers and/or as academic researchers. Other career paths our former PhD students have taken include publishing, social work, administration, and retail.

Your future

Given the breadth of our provision within the Department of Language and Linguistics, career prospects for our graduates vary depending on the study undertaken. Often the career destination of our PhD students is university lecturing or research. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the areas of linguistics we cover, this could be in departments of English, linguistics, education, sociology, or cognitive science.