The Department of Linguistics at Yale embraces an integrative approach to the study of the language, based on the premise that an understanding of the human language faculty arises only from the combination of insights from the development of explicit formal theories with careful descriptive and experimental work. Members of the department offer courses and conduct research in which theoretical inquiry proceeds in partnership with historical and comparative studies, fieldwork, experimental work, cognitive neuroscience, and computational and mathematical modeling. Faculty expertise includes all of the major domains of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) and spans a wide range of languages, with particular expertise in Slavic, Romance, Australian and Indo-Iranian.