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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Daniel Jones
D.B. Fry
A.C. Gimson
John Wells
Valerie Hazan
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