Students with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher are encouraged to write an honors thesis. An honors thesis is a year-long project for which students conduct in-depth research in a topic of their own choosing. Topics have ranged from purely linguistic concerns to those that cross over to fields such as political science, education, cognitive psychology, the biological sciences, and women's and gender studies.

Past Linguistics Honors Projects

• Takanori Adachi, 1993. Sarcasm in Japanese.
• Susan Cox, 1995. Relativizers in Spoken Tibetan.
• Lars Jönsson, 1995. Sarcasm with Particular Reference to German.
• Benjamin Matthews, 1995. A Preliminary Investigation of Gay Male Speech.
• Amy Webber, 1996. A Man's Writing, a Woman's Speech: The Gender Factor in Written Language.
• Kobin Kendrik, 2003. The Izzo and Language Change.
• Stephanie Farmer, 2008. The Origins of Nonsense: An Analysis of Bo'ri'va:r Sap in Khmer.
• Eric Weisser, 2008. Ashkii Bizaad: Verbal Morphology Loss in One Young Speaker's Navajo.
• Joanna Clark, 2010. The Effect of Learning on Sentence Prosody in Japanese.
• Amanda Richardson, 2010. Effect of Visual Input on Vowel Production in English Speakers.
• Ronny Watkins, 2010. Avatime Noun Classes.
• Charlie Brenner, 2010. Event Segmentation and Memory Retrieval in Reading Comprehension.