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The small, focused character of the department, and its commitment to research interaction among faculty and students, makes for a lively research environment. Apart from the regular colloquium series, there are many less formal but active working groups, such as S-Circle, Morphology Reading Group, Prosody Interest Group, and others. Once each year the participants of the Graduate Research Seminar present their papers to the entire department (and interested visitors) at LASC (Linguistics at Santa Cruz), an event which gives students the opportunity to gain valuable conference experience at an early point in their career. Finishing students present their dissertations in the form of a department-level talk as well.

The Linguistics Research Center exists to facilitate the research activities of the department (and of the broader community of linguists at UCSC), hosting research associates, organizing conferences and workshops, and publishing occasional working papers and other volumes.

Research projects funded by the National Science Foundation form an important focus of faculty and graduate student activities. There have been NSF-funded projects in the department in each year since the founding of the doctoral program. Two recent NSF-funded projects include Optimal Typology: Syntactic Markedness Hierarchies in Optimality Theory (Judith Aissen, PI), and Existentials at the Interface (Sandra Chung and James McCloskey, co-PI's).

The Santa Cruz Language and Linguistics group (SCLL) provides opportunities for cooperation with philosophers interested in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. It hosts an interdisciplinary reading group and a Distinguished Visitor Series.

Dissertations written in the department are published by SlubPubs.