Research Areas
The Department of Linguistics has identified five areas of focus in its research agenda, all of which reflect the Department’s institutional mandate, current research activities, and future disciplinal trajectories.
Philippine Structural and Historical Linguistics
This area deals with the collection of linguistic data from Philippine languages in an attempt to adequately describe their grammatical components such as sound, syllable, phrase, and sentence. The linguistic data gathered in the duration of the research under this domain may also be utilized to provide answers to the problems encountered by current approaches to linguistic inquiry. It also seeks to study how these languages developed over time and how they are related to each other, thus giving insights into the history not only of words (etymology), but of the speech communities as well.
Philippine Linguistic Geography
The area aims at describing patterns of linguistic variations over a geographic space in the Philippine setting. By undertaking research on dialectology, contact linguistics, and language vitality, this area takes into account the changes in the components of language that are subject to geographic and social variation. In particular, it seeks to determine the effects of language contact in a multilingual country like the Philippines, which is home to a dynamic and constantly migrating population.
Comparative Studies of Filipino and Other Asian Languages
The objective of this area is to solve linguistic issues and enhance pedagogy, translation, and interpretation in Filipino and other Asian languages by looking at the similarities and/or differences of their phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic systems.
Entanglements of Philippine Linguistics with Other Disciplines
This area attempts to use multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary approaches to the study of Philippine languages by doing collaborative work with other disciplines. The research projects done under this area will generate more holistic and insightful ideas on the languages of the Philippines and the communities that speak them.
Asian Language Teaching Methods
The research projects undertaken within this area shall focus on describing linguistic structures of Asian languages and how to effectively utilize linguistic knowledge to improve the teaching of these languages. Various methods in the teaching of foreign languages shall be considered in order to identify successful techniques in teaching Asian languages within and outside the University.
