The programme offered by the institute

The institute's Ph.D. programme has three components:

  1. Seminars related to project groups in which the student participates;

    2.  Each research group has designated project groups which conduct a seminar that is part of the PhD-programme. In such a seminar, faculty, postdocs and PhD-students discuss their ongoing research, and issues that are related to it. Systematic attention is paid to relevant theoretical developments.
  2. Tutorials offered by staff members;

    3. Tutorials are an informal mode of teaching, often in a 1-to-1 situation. They have been introduced in order to develop a flexible system that allows students to profit optimally from the fact that UiL OTS harbours a wide range of expertise, and admits only relatively small numbers of students.
    A tutorial is offered by a staff member in the field of his or her expertise, by specifying a subject, the expected entrance level of a student, the subjects to be treated (with relevant literature) and the level that is to be reached. A tutorial is offered on demand (but at most once a year). The form in which a tutorial will be offered may vary. It may take place in the form of weekly meetings, monthly discussion of assigned reading material, or, occasionally, participation in (parts of) advanced MA-level courses. Each research group specifies the tutorials that are being offered by its staff members. Together, these tutorials guarantee the students access to the whole area of expertise covered by the UiL OTS staff. In addition, there are often tutorials and seminars offered by visiting faculty. These are sometimes announced in the yearly programme, sometimes in the course of the year.
    In order to enhance the quality and the interdisciplinary nature of UiL OTS research, students will be required to take a certain number of seminars and tutorials outside the immediate field of their project.
  3. Supervision by the main advisor (promotor) and other members of the advisory committee of the research project that the student is carrying out.

    4. Each student has regular individual meetings with his of her advisor and members of his or her committee. The frequency varies, depending on the needs of the student and the development of the project, between once a week and once a month.
Seminars and tutorials (ordered by subject):

  1. PHONETICS

    2. Seminar:Phonetic Underdetermination
    Tutorials:Prosody, Psycho-acoustics / Speech Perception, Word Recognition

  1. PHONOLOGY & MORPHOLOGY

    2. Seminar:Metrical Phonology
    Tutorials:Introduction to Metrical Phonology, Phonological Acquisition, Advanced Metrical Phonology, Lexical Morphology

  1. SYNTAX & SEMANTICS

    2. Seminar:Syntax and Semantics of Phrase Structure
    Tutorials:Introduction: Issues in Syntactic Theory, Introduction in Semantics, Language Acquisition, Interfaces and Economy, Aspect Theory and Quantification, Diachronic Syntax, Introduction in Psycholinguistics

  1. COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AND LOGIC

    2. Seminar:Categorial Grammar and Type Theory
    Tutorials:Introduction to Categorial Grammar, Advanced Categorial Grammar, Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, Dynamic Interpretation of Natural Language

  1. PRAGMATICS

    2. Seminar:Discourse Theory
    Tutorials:Topic and Presupposition, Coherence Relations, Discourse Anaphora, Text Processing

  1. COMMUNICATION THEORY

    2. Seminar:Institutional Discourse Analysis
    Tutorials:Argumentation Theory, Translation Theory, Interaction Analysis, Intercultural Communication

  1. LANGUAGE CHANGE AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

    2. Seminar:see Syntax & Semantics
    Tutorials:Introduction in Psycholinguistics, Acquisition of Syntax, Historical Syntax, Phonological Acquisition, Second Language Acquisition

  1. LANGUAGE AND SPEECH TECHNOLOGY

    2. Seminar:Natural Language Processing
    Tutorials:Machine Translation, Speech Recognition, Controlled Languages

  1. LEXICOLOGY

    2. Seminar:Lexicology and Lexicography
    Tutorials:Lexical Semantics, The Ideal Dictionary

  1. TEXT ORGANIZATION

    2. Seminar:Text Evaluation Methods
    Tutorials:Document Design, Reader Based Text Evaluation, Learning and Reading Strategies, Stylistic Variation

Undergraduate programme
The research areas of UiL OTS have direct counterparts in the following areas of specialisation in the undergraduate curriculum of the Faculty of Arts: Language and Speech Engineering, Language and Language Structure, Sociolinguistics, Communication studies, Educational linguistics, and Phonetics (see the brochure Language and Speech). Moreover, the courses offered in the area of Cognitive Artificial Intelligence (CKI) of the Philosophy faculty benefit from the expertise developed at UiL OTS. Together with the various language programmes of the undergraduate curriculum UiL OTS strives toward creating a special curriculum catering to the needs of students specifically interested in covering a wider spectrum of linguistics at a higher level than the current curriculum allows.

 

Updated 28-04-2004
UiL-OTS@let.uu.nl