Undergraduate Courses

List of courses offered by the Linguistics Department.

To see if a class meets in the current quarter, as well as the time and location, go to the Linguistics Department’s Course Schedule page.

Courses usually offered every quarter are Linguistics 1, 20, 102 or 103, 119A or 120A, 120B. Most other courses may be offered one or two quarters. An internal tentative Linguistics course offerings list for the following academic year is made available at the end of May or early June of the preceding academic year.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How big are UCLA Linguistics courses?
The majority of required linguistics courses for the majors are capped at 40 students per lecture, with the exception of Linguistics 1, 20, 102, 119A, and 120B.
Who do I contact for assistance with course planning?
Please refer to the Undergraduate Student Affairs Officer for guidance with course planning for the major.
Can I take major requirements as pass/no pass?
Only foreign language requirements may be taken for Pass/No Pass grading. All other preparation for the major and upper-division major requirements must be taken for a letter grade. *Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, exceptions have been made to this policy. Please visit the majors/minor page to view the memos outlining these exceptions.
Can I take preparation for the major requirements at a community college or other university?
Yes, however, you must first consult with the Undergraduate Student Affairs Officer if you plan to take courses at another college or university for approval and confirmation.
I completed a course for my major, but it does not appear on my degree audit report. What do I do?
Please send an email to the Undergraduate Student Affairs Officer to address this inquiry. Include your university ID number and the course information in the email.

Fall 2024

  • ASL 1 - Elementary American Sign Language

    Instructor(s): Benjamin Lewis, Jennifer Marfino

    Lecture, five hours. Introduction to fundamentals of American sign language. P/NP or letter grading.

  • ASL 4 - Intermediate American Sign Language

    Instructor(s): Jennifer Marfino

    Lecture, five hours. Enforced requisite: course 3 or 8. Intermediate American sign language. P/NP or letter grading.

  • ASL M115 - Enforcing Normalcy: Deaf and Disability Studies

    Instructor(s): Benjamin Lewis

    (Same as Disability Studies M115.) Lecture, three hours. Exploration of historical, medical, social, political, philosophical, and cultural influences that have constructed categories of normalcy, disability, and deafness. Building on writing of Michel Foucault and critical work in field of disability studies, inquiry into institutions that have enforced standards of normalcy throughout 19th and 20th centuries to present. Primary attention to rise of medical authority in West, history of eugenics, and contemporary bioethics issues confronting disability and deaf communities. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 1 - Introduction to Study of Language

    Instructor(s): Anissa Gladney, Zia Khoshsirat, Arjun Srirangarajan, Elizabeth Sola-llonch, Janos Egressy, Giuseppina Silvestri, Erika Yagi

    Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Summary for general undergraduates of what is known about human language; biological basis of language, scientific study of language and human cognition; uniqueness of human language, its structure, universality, its diversity; language in social and cultural setting; language in relation to other aspects of human inquiry and knowledge. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 20 - Introduction to Linguistic Analysis

    Instructor(s): Chengzhi Zhang, Thomas Conway, Coralie Cram, Abeer Abbas, Jahnavi Narkar, Ekaterina Khlystova, Claire Moore-cantwell

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Introduction to theory and methods of linguistics: universal properties of human language; phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic structures and analysis; nature and form of grammar. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 99 - Student Research Program

    Instructor(s): Megha Sundara, Jesse Harris, Daria Bahtina

    Tutorial (supervised research or other scholarly work), three hours per week per unit. Entry-level research for lower-division students under guidance of faculty mentor. Students must be in good academic standing and enrolled in minimum of 12 units (excluding this course). Individual contract required; consult Undergraduate Research Center. May be repeated. P/NP grading.

  • LING 103 - Introduction to General Phonetics

    Instructor(s): Hannah Lippard, Elise Bell

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Enforced requisite: course 20. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 102. Phonetics of variety of languages and phonetic phenomena that occur in languages of world. Extensive practice in perception and production of such phenomena. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 105 - Morphology

    Instructor(s): Kalen Chang, Michelle Yuan

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Enforced requisite: course 20. In linguistics, morphology is study of word structure. Morphological theory seeks to answer questions such as how should words and their component parts (roots, prefixes, suffixes, vowel changes) be classified crosslinguistically? how do speakers store, produce, and process complex words (words with affixes, compounds)? how do speakers know how to produce correct word forms even when they have not previously heard them and how do speakers know that particular words are well-formed or ill-formed? is there principled distinction in traditional division between inflection and derivation? how can we best account for variation in forms that are same (e.g., root in keep/kept even though vowels are different)? can we formulate crosslinguistic generalizations about word structure? P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 110 - Introduction to Historical Linguistics

    Instructor(s): Muhammad Rehan, David Goldstein

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisites: courses 20, 102 or 103, 119A or 120A. Methods and theories appropriate to historical study of language, such as comparative method and method of internal reconstruction. Sound change, grammatical change, semantic change. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 119A - Applied Phonology

    Instructor(s): Samuel Zukoff, Zachary Metzler

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Enforced requisites: courses 20, and 102 or 103. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 120A. Sound structures and sound patterns in world's languages. Rules, rule ordering, features, syllable, and higher structure. Comparison of sound patterns of different languages. Tools of phonology as applicable to other fields. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 120A - Phonology I

    Instructor(s): Samuel Zukoff, Lily Xu

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisites: courses 20, 103. Introduction to phonological theory and analysis. Rules, representations, underlying forms, derivations. Justification of phonological analyses. Emphasis on practical skills with problem sets. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 120B - Syntax I

    Instructor(s): Ziv Plotnik-peleg, Isaac Warren, Timothy Hunter

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Enforced requisite: course 20. Course 120A is not requisite to 120B. Descriptive analysis of morphological and syntactic structures in natural languages; emphasis on insight into nature of such structures rather than linguistics formalization. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 120C - Semantics I

    Instructor(s): Dylan Bumford, Anand Abraham

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisite: course 119B or 120B. Survey of most important theoretical and descriptive claims about nature of meaning. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 132 - Language Processing

    Instructor(s): Monique Mangum, Hyun Bae

    Lecture, four hours; laboratory, one hour (when scheduled). Requisites: courses 20, 119A or 120A, 119B or 120B. Central issues in language comprehension and production, with emphasis on how theories in linguistics inform processing models. Topics include word understanding (with emphasis on spoken language), parsing, anaphora and inferencing, speech error models of sentence production, and computation of syntactic structure during production. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING C135 - Neurolinguistics

    Instructor(s): Hyun Bae

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisites: courses 20, 119A or 120A, 119B or 120B. Examination of relationship between brain, language, and linguistic theory, with evidence presented from atypical language development and language disorders in the mature brain. Topics include methodologies to investigate normal and atypical hemispheric specialization for language and children and adults with acquired and/or congenital language disorders. Concurrently scheduled with course C235. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING C140 - Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition

    Instructor(s): Daria Bahtina, Nicholas Guymon

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisites: courses 119A or 120A, 119B or 120B. Introduction to study of childhood bilingualism and adult and child second language (L2) acquisition, with focus on understanding nature of L2 grammar and grammatical processes underlying L2/bilingual acquisition. Discussion of neurolinguistic and social aspects of bilingualism. Concurrently scheduled with course C244. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 165B - Syntax II

    Instructor(s): Thomas Motter, Huilei Wang

    Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisite: course 120B. To be taken in term following completion of course 120B or as soon as possible thereafter. Recommended for students who plan to do graduate work in linguistics. Form of grammars, word formation, formal and substantive universals in syntax, relation between syntax and semantics. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 185A - Computational Linguistics I

    Instructor(s): John Mcgahay, Laurel Perkins

    Lecture, four hours; laboratory, one hour. Requisites: courses 120B, Program in Computing 10C (or Computer Science 32). Recommended: course 165B or 200B. Overview of formal computational ideas underlying kinds of grammars used in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics, and some connections to applications in natural language processing. Topics include recursion, relationship between probabilities and grammars, and parsing algorithms. P/NP or letter grading.

  • LING 191A - Variable Topics Research Seminars: Linguistics

    Instructor(s): Yael Sharvit

    Study of linguistic tools in literature from cross-linguistic perspective. Analysis of actual texts from various languages. Students learn to understand how linguistic tools are used to deliver literary content.

  • SWAHILI 1 - Elementary Swahili

    Instructor(s): Sephrine Achesah

    Lecture, five hours. Major language of East Africa, particularly Tanzania. P/NP or letter grading.