The Linguistics Department provides a variety of resources to support research and learning by students and faculty, including the Linguistics Lab, Linguistics Classroom, Linguistics Research Commons, Linguistics Reading Room, and the Santa Barbara Archive of Language and Discourse. The department also provides Field Recording Equipment to support graduate student research. Additionally, there are many external resources which may be useful.

Linguistics Lab

The new Linguistics Lab (4430 South Hall) was inaugurated in 2010, and instantly became the hub of graduate student life in the department. The lab offers graduate students (and the occasional faculty) a wide range of facilities to support collaborative research. Surrounding a large central space for general graduate student research, well supplied with computer workstations for student use, is a cluster of five “satellite” labs and meeting rooms. These rooms support a range of more specialized research activities: language documentation, field work, video analysis, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistic experiments, and so on, as well as impromptu video conferencing and meetings of graduate student groups or research teams. An additional satellite lab on the 3rd floor (3607B South Hall) supports research in neurolinguistic imaging.

Linguistics Classroom

Our new classroom (3605 South Hall) incorporates a number of features designed to support innovative forms of teaching uniquely suited to the study of language and linguistics. Instructors, teaching assistants, and course participants can all present their work and their instruction via wireless access to data projectors. Multiple large monitors in the classroom allow small groups to gather in breakout sessions to analyze audio and video data. All tables and chairs are on casters, allowing real-time reconfiguration of the class from lecture format to small collaborative groups as the need arises during an ongoing class session.

Linguistics Research Commons

The Linguistics Research Commons (3607 South Hall) provides a suite of rooms surrounding a large meeting space, all designed to support a variety of collaborative research groups in the department.

Linguistics Reading Room

The Linguistics Reading Room (3617A South Hall) houses the department’s collection of hundreds of books and monographs on language and linguistics, including many rare titles, grammars, dictionaries, and other reference works. A computerized database allows users to check on holdings via a web interface. The Reading Room is a quiet place to read and work, providing an alternative space that supplements the much larger linguistics collections of the main University Library.

Santa Barbara Archive of Language and Discourse

The Santa Barbara Archive of Language and Discourse (SBALD) houses rare archival research materials on languages and linguistics from many languages, including audio and video recordings documenting languages from around the world. The primary holdings document the cumulative research activity of UCSB faculty and graduate students over the past half-century, and in many cases represent unique and irreplaceable recordings of speakers of endangered languages. In keeping with the research focus of the department, many of the recordings document both grammatical, lexical, and phonological elicitation, and naturally occurring discourse, across a typologically diverse sampling of the world’s languages.

Field Recording Equipment

The Linguistics Department is strongly committed to introducing students to the state of the art digital technologies to support their linguistic research, including linguistic field work. Graduate students are able to borrow equipment provided by the department to support their field research, including high quality digital audio recorders, video recorders, and microphones.

External Resources

Linguists at UCSB may find the following resources useful. Additional lists of external resources especially for UCSB undergraduates may be found in the undergraduate resource page and the LingClub page.