University College London University College London is the oldest and largest of the colleges and institutes that make up the University of London. Founded in 1826 to provide higher education for all who would profit by it, regardless of creed, race, or class, the College was the first institution in England to admit Jews, dissenters, and those of any or no religion to its courses, and also the first to admit women. Down the years University College has consistently been in the forefront of academic advance. It founded the first chairs in the country in English, in Engineering, in Psychology, and in Experimental Phonetics. With about 7000 undergraduates and 2800 postgraduates spread over sixty-five departments and studying subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology, the College is larger and more varied than many universities. It is a lively, controversial and interesting place to work in, often stimulating and rarely dull. Department of Phonetics and Linguistics The Department of Phonetics and Linguistics was formed in 1971 by the amalgamation of the existing departments of Phonetics and General Linguistics. Phonetics at University College can be said to reach back to 1866, when Alexander Melville Bell gave lectures on speech; he was assisted by his son Alexander Graham Bell, then a student at the College, and later to find fame as the inventor of the telephone. Systematic teaching of Phonetics started in 1907 with the appointment of Daniel Jones. He became the first Professor of the subject in 1921, and by the time of his retirement in 1949 had created a thriving Department with a world-wide reputation. As Head of Department he was succeeded by D.B.Fry. In 1953 UCL set up an interdisciplinary Communications Research Centre, which in 1965 was incorporated in a new Department of Linguistics headed by M.A.K.Halliday. In 1971 the two Departments merged under A.C.Gimson; he was succeeded as Head of Department by N.V.Smith (1983-90), J.C.Wells (1990-2000), and now Valerie Hazan (2000-). Expertise Today the Department is pre-eminent in the United Kingdom and the world, offering undergraduate and postgraduate courses across the full range of the language sciences, as listed in the following pages. Apart from our breadth of coverage we are particularly distinguished in at least three areas: articulatory phonetics, especially the study and description of English pronunciation; theoretical linguistics, especially the study of syntax, pragmatics and phonology; and experimental phonetics, particularly speech perception, speech technology, speech and language pathology, and speech and hearing science. |
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