Honors

Honors work brings great personal and intellectual rewards, including mastery of a topic, and getting to know two faculty members quite well.

Requirements of the Honors Program

Students should be aware that the honors program requires a significant amount of time commitment throughout all three quarters of the senior year (in recognition of this, 10 units of directed reading and honors research can be devoted to writing the thesis).

Honors students take a total of 70 units. These must include:

60 units for the major
10 additional units (fulfilled in the senior year by 199. Independent Study and 198. Honors Research; see below)
And an honors thesis based on research conducted with a principal advisor who must be a member of the Linguistics faculty, and a secondary faculty advisor, who may, with the approval of the Undergraduate Studies Committee, be a member of another department.
In the Fall of the senior year, honors students enroll in Linguistics 199, Independent Study, to work closely with one of the advisors on the research project.
In Winter and Spring quarter of the senior year honor students register in Linguistics 198, Honors Research, with the principal advisor for close supervision of the honors thesis.
Students will meet in an honors workshop (1 unit of 198, Honors Research is available) each of winter and spring quarters, to share questions and findings. This workshop will also serve as a writing and oral presentation workshop with focus on preparing for presentations in the Spring quarter Honors Colloquium.

How to Apply for Honors

Students should apply for honors by the end of Spring quarter of the junior year. This allows preliminary steps in the thesis research to begin over the Summer before the senior year.

Approval for honors depends on the number of courses in the major that students have taken for a letter grade by the start of the third quarter of the junior year. For students who have completed at least 28 units for a letter grade in fulfillment of major requirements, only those maintaining a grade point average of 3.3 (B+) or better in these courses are eligible for honors. Students who have taken fewer than 28 units in the major for a letter grade must receive an endorsement from both a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics who will supervise or co-supervise the honors project and a second Linguistics faculty member who can attest to the student’s qualifications for carrying out honors research.

Honors applications must be signed by the Director of Undergraduate Studies and a thesis project advisor, and then sent to the Assistant Director of Student Services. As part of the process, students will write a research proposal describing their honors project and have it approved by their faculty advisor.

Apply for honors work in Linguistics

Honors Thesis Submission

The thesis must be submitted in final, acceptable form by the dissertation/thesis submission deadline, together with the Department's Honors Thesis Signature Form, signed by the principal advisor and second reader. The second reader can be any faculty member in Linguistics or a related department. We ask students to follow the LSA/Language guidelines with regard to referencing and formatting.

The thesis must be submitted in hard copy to the Assistant Director of Student Services along with the Honors Thesis Signature Form, by the deadline.

Honors Thesis Presentation

The thesis topic will be presented orally at a Department of Linguistics Honors Colloquium late in Spring quarter.

Human Subjects

If the project involves human subjects, the student will need to participate in human subjects training and obtain approvals for conducting the research. See the Department of Linguistics human subjects page and the Stanford Human Subjects Research page for further information.

Funding

Funding for honors research is available through the Office of Undergraduate Advising and Research. Requests for Summer funding are due in early April.