The Department of Linguistics offers a secondary field in Linguistic Theory for PhD students enrolled in other departments at Harvard. Linguistic theory, the core of the modern field of linguistics, seeks to characterize the linguistic knowledge that normal human beings acquire in the course of mastering their native language between the ages of one and five. Studied as an internalized formal system, language is a source of insight into a wide range of human pursuits and abilities, some of them traditionally approached through the humanities, others through the social sciences, and others through the behavioral and natural sciences.
The major divisions of linguistic theory are syntax, the study of sentence structure; phonology, the study of sounds and sound systems; morphology, the study of word structure; and semantics; the study of meaning. Courses in these areas regularly draw students from other Harvard departments, especially Psychology, Philosophy, and other departments associated with the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative. The secondary field in Linguistic Theory allows such students to receive official recognition for their linguistics coursework.