The Student Room Group

Oxford Linguistics interview - not the test - what is going on?

Dear Fellow students and linguists: I can see that the thread for Oxford linguistics is closed, but we need to open it again. The interviews alas are online now (shocking as part of the Oxbridge experience is having a cozy chat by a blazing fire and having the Harry Potter overnight stay and food if only for one day in our life). What has happened to the Linguistics interview when I get rumours that it was hard and unpleasant. This is by a fellow linguist who worked his socks off to prepare. Let's have a post-mortem please.
Reply 1
Original post by MrGullible
Hi! I did an interview with Hertford college on Monday, and didn't find it at all painful or unpleasant. One of the things that surprised me was they asked questions with objective right and wrong answers, rather than debate style questions like the dreaded "What is language?". They opened with a question related to my personal statement (asked me to define ergativity as I had talked about it) and then did like some language comparison exercises.

I wish you all the best. Do you think that the general questions are on their way out? The uploads to Youtube are both nightmarish and very male (I am sorry to say this). It's so male to think that linguistics is all these exercises in vogue, eg "let me throw you some Swahili, with no translations of the verbs, and see you flounder". All very American (very Stanford University). The dream of the overnight stay is also gone, but apparently new students don't miss this (like the rest of the country, gone to the dogs, what you don't have you don't miss). For the show-cased interview on Youtube (I think 2021) the best one can do is to try to grab some etymological trait, even if wrong (for some reason I am thinking that (ku)pika is connected to cooking - which is just a wild guess, right as it turns out - the rest, I am even doubtful that it was a real interview (so far I have not heard a A leveller talking about morphemes). Worrying most of all, is that the student being interviewed (that I know) seems very green (not stupid and certainly a linguist in the old-fashioned sense, ie bilingual in Romance langs). There's no way these days that students walk out (like perhaps we did at UCL) thinking that was good, but now more like "oh my god, four years of those stupid exercises". Remember that Chomsky was absolutely shunned in the 1980s at Oxford and Linguistics was not taught (don't know until when later). Also I don't get to hear about the Lings lecturers there, except for one, who must be emeritus by now. So one subject that was narrow, it has been made even narrower. Not happy at all. Let's see if it can salvaged by doing Lings with a MFL. This is the lemmings interviewing those who want to jump off the academic cliff with them. A death wish on the part of the academics. And I blame the Americans for this.
Reply 2
Troll, although somewhat entertaining.

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