The linguistics collection, including materials for theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics, serves the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Program, the Second Language Studies (SLS) Program, the linguistics-related curricular needs of the Department of English, the English Language Center, and the Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA). The Linguistics Program offers a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics, and an M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). The interdisciplinary program in Second Language Studies offers a Ph.D. The English Language Center offers the Intensive English Program (IEP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Program, both of which are non-degreed. • The linguistics collection comprises the categories of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, philosophy of language, sociolinguistics, dialects and variations, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, first language acquisition, second language acquisition/learning, pragmatics, discourse analysis, computational linguistics, and teaching English as a second language.
In addition to monographs, edited collections, and journals, the linguistics collection includes linguistic corpora data resources. These data are used to support a wide variety of linguistics research that is often computational in nature. Specific methods of analysis include but are not limited to sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, part of speech tagging, and syntactic parsing. Corpora are acquired from vendors, and increasingly exploration is made into acquisition of corpora from non traditional and open web sources and emerging technologies. Given generation of data associated with this research it will become desirable on a case by case basis to explore acquisition of faculty research data for inclusion in the MSU Libraries research data repository.
The collection was considered part of the Literature/English & American collection until 1996 when a separate fund was established to collect materials in theoretical and applied linguistics and English writing/rhetoric. Several essential linguistics journals were added to the collection in 1998 as a result of a serials review project, with consultation of linguistics faculty. Some more core serials were added to the linguistics collection in 2000 at the faculty's recommendation. Materials of various subjects were added to the collection to fulfill the curricular needs for the Linguistic Society of America 2003 Institute held on campus, such as linguistic corpora, contact linguistics, second language acquisitions, sociolinguistics, and Japanese linguistics. Some journals in second language studies were added in 2005 as a result of a serials review project in consultation with the faculty in linguistics, TESOL and SLS. In 2005, the responsibility of collecting for English writing/rhetoric was transferred to the literature bibliographer along with the appropriation.