For decades, MIT has been widely held to have one of the best linguistics programs in the world. But what is linguistics and what does it teach us about human language? To learn more about the ways linguists help make a better world, SHASS Communications recently spoke with David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT. A Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow (MIT’s highest undergraduate teaching award), Pesetsky focuses his research on syntax and the implications of syntactic theory to language acquisition, semantics, phonology, and morphology (word-structure). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.