Financial Support

New Students

A few highly competitive assistantships are available, including teaching assistantships in English composition and elementary foreign language instruction. Candidates should indicate in their applications that they wish to be considered for assistantships. All applicants who express a need for assistance are considered for all appropriate university support. However, applicants are encouraged to seek outside funding for their graduate studies since the amount of local support available is highly competitive.

Continuing Students

Departmental teaching assistantships are annual appointments for which renewal is contingent upon funding. Renewal of teaching assistantships, assuming that funding continues to be available and that the student demonstrates satisfactory teaching and progress towards the degree, is limited to a maximum of two years for those admitted to the M.A. program, three years for students admitted to the Ph.D. program with an M.A. related to Linguistics already in hand, or four years for students admitted to the Ph.D. program with only a B.A. degree or with an unrelated M.A. degree. The duration of University-Wide Research Assistantships depends upon the regulations of the Graduate School. Assistantships of any kind, from whatever source, will be counted against the above time limits. For example, a student admitted to the Ph.D. program with a B.A. degree, who is thus eligible for four years of assistantships, might hold a University-Wide Research Assistantship for two years and would then be eligible for only two years of a teaching assistantship.

Teaching assistantships in other departments may be available to Linguistics graduate students, although these appointments may require course work which will not contribute to progress towards a Linguistics degree.

Travel Support

Doctoral students who present papers at academic conferences may apply for financial assistance. The program has a very limited amount of such funding, often depleted early in the academic year. The department will, however, assist students in requesting such financial support from other offices of the university (e.g. the Graduate School and the Vice President for Research), although it will usually not be possible to finance numerous trips or even single trips completely.