Syntax is the study of sentence structure, its relationship to meaning, and theoretical models that account for the ability of speakers to generate an infinite number of novel utterances. Morphology is the study of word structure and its relationship both to sentence structure and to meaning.

Sociolinguistics and Language Variation involve the study of how language varies among different groups of speakers and the relationship of this variation to social factors. The examination of the reciprocal effects of social organization and social contexts on language use and the exploration of social and linguistic diversity helps us better understand how we use language to construct personal, cultural, and social identities.

Semantics is the study of meaning in language, including the logical aspects of meaning (formal semantics), word meanings and their relations (lexical semantics), and the cognitive structure of meaning (conceptual semantics).

Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis involve the study of language in its contexts of use. Pragmatics focuses on the effects of context on meaning, and Discourse Analysis studies written and spoken language in relation to its social context.

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds as physical entities (their articulation, acoustic properties, and how they are perceived), and phonology is the study of the organization and function of speech sounds as part of the grammar of a language. The perspectives of these two closely related subfields are combined in laboratory phonology, which seeks to understand the relationship between cognitive and physical aspects of human speech.

Language documentation aims to capture and preserve the linguistic practices of a given community through audio and video recording, transcription, and annotation. It describes the grammar of endangered language varieties and how these varieties are used.

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the ability to comprehend and produce language, either as their first or second (third, etc.) language. The study of language acquisition provides evidence for theoretical linguistics and has practical applications in language pedagogy.

Historical linguistics is the scientific study of how languages change over time, which seeks to understand the relationships among languages and to reconstruct earlier stages of languages. At UGA, our primary focus is on historical Indo-European linguistics – the history and development of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English.

Corpus linguistics is a rapidly growing methodology that uses the statistical analysis of large collections of written or spoken data (corpora) to investigate linguistic phenomena.

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. It includes computational modeling of linguistic phenomena and the use of computational techniques to process natural language for research purposes and practical applications.