General information on the M.St., M.Phil., and D.Phil. in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics is available on the main Graduate Courses site as well as in the Graduate Studies Handbook.
M.St. and M.Phil.
Detailed admissions criteria are laid out in the relevant Graduate Admissions site. Students interested in philology will usually follow one of the pathways list below:
- choose Historical and Comparative Linguistics and/or History and Structure of a Language as part of their set of B options
- choose option C, pursuing the study of Proto-Indo-European and a subset of its daughter languages
- choose option D, focusing on the History and Structure of one language, or of two or more historically related languages
Papers offered under options C and D involve an obligatory translation paper in one or more relevant language(s). Students reading for the M.Phil. will further be expected to produce a thesis of up to 25,000 words in a philological subject, if they choose options C or D.
The languages selected by students choosing option C should normally be ancient Indo-European languages (with one being the major, the other the minor language of study), while those interested in option D may study ancient (e.g. Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Akkadian) or Modern languages (e.g. French, Italian, German, English, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Czech). Only languages for which teaching is available at the time may be offered. Previous combinations have included: Indo-Iranian and Germanic; Greek and Germanic; Armenian and Iranian; Anatolian and Greek; etc.
Enquiries concerning the availability of language teaching and supervision should be directed to the Faculty Assistant Administrator in the first instance.
D.Phil.
Detailed admissions criteria are laid out in the relevant Graduate Admissions site.
Owing to the nature of doctoral research, it is imperative to find a suitable supervisor; accordingly, before applying for a D.Phil., it is sensible to get in touch with potential supervisors and discuss project ideas and their feasibility. A list of staff and their specialties can be found on the People page.
Previous D.Phil. thesis topics have included:
- Iranian-Armenian language contact in and before the 5th century CE: An investigation into pattern replication and societal multilingualism
- The phonetics of labialized velars in Ancient Greek
- The linguistic elements of Old Germanic metre: Phonology, metrical theory, and the development of alliterative verse
- Analogy in Morphological Change: The diachronic treatment of irregularity in Greek
- Conjugation Class from Latin to Romance: Heteroclisis in Diachrony and Synchrony
- The Language of Menander Comicus and its Relation to the Koine
- Περὶ τῶν εἰς νυμί — A study on athematic -(ν)νῡ/(ν)νῠ- suffixed presents from Homer to Oppian of Cilicia
- Verborum ordo — ordo verborum: the placement of the dependent genitive in Classical Latin
- The Syntax and Semantics of Tense-Aspect Stem Particles in early Rgvedic Sanskrit
