Introduction

The courses for MA in Linguistics (semester based) are designed to enable the students to become theory-oriented and explanatorily motivated academic linguists, observationally oriented and descriptively motivated field linguists, and also service-oriented and developmentally motivated applied linguists. The courses further aim at promoting linguistics as an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary discipline, encouraging the students to describe numerous languages of Nepal and applying the knowledge of linguistics in various fields. MA in Linguistics will be of four semester of two year duration. Each semester will be of six months and there will be 60 credit hours in total for four semesters, each credit hour equaling to 16 teaching hours. The courses comprise various fields of theoretical and applied linguistics. All the courses are compulsory in the first and second semesters. Semester I introduces basic courses in linguistics; namely, phonetics, morphology, syntax, history of linguistics and sociolinguistics. Semester II also offers basic courses; namely, phonology, semantics and pragmatics, linguistic typology, research methods and field linguistics and psycholinguistics. Semester III introduces three compulsory courses; namely, historical linguistics, Nepalese linguistics and modern linguistic theories. This semester further offers various types of specialization courses like advanced phonetics, advanced phonology, advanced morphology, advanced syntax, advanced pragmatics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, functional-typological grammar, lexical functional grammar, role and reference grammar, minimalist program and cognitive linguistics. Semester IV offers various courses in applied linguistics like bilingualism and multilingualism, linguistic anthropology, second language acquisition, spoken language, language contact, language documentation, language teaching, multilingual education, lexicography, literary linguistics, language policy and planning, language revitalization, clinical linguistics, forensic linguistics and translation studies. Two courses are compulsory. The course entitled Project in linguistics 3 and dissertation (equalling 6 credit hours) are compulsory in this semester. Table 1 presents a flowchart of courses of study including names of the courses, code number and credit hours. Moreover, the courses included in each semester will consist of theory (60%) and practical (40%).