Utrecht University

In this course, students acquire knowledge and insight with respect to the most important phenomena and theories on the interface of semantics and pragmatics. The interpretation of an utterance lies at the intersection of grammatical, logical, conceptual, contextual, and communicative factors. Semantics and pragmatics study how those factors determine meaning and what the consequences are for the processing and acquisition of language. In that study, theoretical models and experimental research methods come together. This course is about research at the interface of semantics and pragmatics, of theory and experiment, focusing on a number of topics, like implicatures, proto typicality, reference, and coercion. Prerequisite knowledge of semantics and pragmatics at an introductory level is required.

The course gives students insight to a number of topics that are analyzed from the perspective of different linguistic disciplines: grammar (lexical semantics, morphology), psycholinguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, and typology. Students consider the following: what is the lexicon; what is a word; how are words and their meanings represented in the brain or mental lexicon; how is lexical knowledge acquired; what is the relation between culture and lexicon. Students apply different empirical methods and take a comparative perspective where possible (starting with Dutch and English but also with attention to other European languages and other language families). Specific topics of this course include the meaning of derivational morphemes and complex words, semantic fields, linguistic relativity, and lexical universals.

This course provides students with a solid natural science base for studying global change. As such, it provides the fundamental understanding of natural processes that are needed as a basis for follow-up courses dealing in depth with specific global change effects, such as Global Climate Change. The focus is on the earths' energy balance, the hydrological cycle and the elemental cycles of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, because they are essential for life on earth and are linked to the major global change effects that our society is dealing with today. The course looks at the major stocks of energy, water, and elements in different environmental compartments (atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere), as well as the processes that govern the exchange between those compartments and the storage capacity of the compartments. Subjects that are covered include: the global energy budget; the global cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus; atmosphere; hydrosphere; lithosphere; biosphere.

Many societal problems transcend the borders of the nation-state. Economic developments and trade, crime and terrorism, refugees, climate change, human trafficking, natural disasters, international monetary and financial crises, inequality, are not confined to national territory. To cope with these matters, nation-states have partially delegated competencies to supranational bodies. The number of supranational institutions, laws, rules and norms has, accordingly, tremendously increased over time. As a result, we face a diverse and complex institutional landscape of global governance that has profound influence on the day-to-day life of citizens. This course offers a broad introduction to the theory and practice of global governance. It does so by analyzing the main institutional processes of global governance and, subsequently, by zooming in on selected global issues, such as recent cases of international security, humanitarian and financial crises, the refugee crisis and gender inequality. The following questions are addressed: when do states delegate authority to supranational institutions and why; how do these acts of delegation affect the distribution of power and influence; who is pulling which strings; what repercussions does the complex global institutional landscape have for essential values of (good) governance such as democratic legitimacy and accountability; is global governance truly and evenly global, or are these processes increasingly dividing the powerful and rich from the marginalized and poor?

Social protection from work related sickness and disability is the main driving force in the development of the welfare states in Europe. This course focuses on three basic characteristics: work, health, and well-being. From an interdisciplinary and international comparative perspective, the course covers the historical developments in different European welfare states and their different approaches in the protection from work related sickness and disability. The focus is on the organizational perspective: how do companies (employers and employees) organize the complicated process of work related absence. The focus lies on the shift in Human Resource Management from protection to prevention, from sickness to health, from disability to well-being. The first week offers a basic historical overview of the differences and developments in legislation regarding work related diseases and disability in different European countries. The next six weeks are devoted to the three core concepts: work, health, and well-being. First, the meaning of work, the main changes in the nature and content of work, and its relation to health and work related diseases over time (e.g. burn-out) are covered. Then, insights into social and psychological processes of the interaction between employer and employee in health and work related absence and what practices are offered by companies (e.g. reintegration programs) are discussed. Lastly, the focus is on the prevention perspective of sustainable employability: how do employers and employees safeguard sustainable employability and well-being, with a focus on endangered groups such as flex-workers and elderly workers. In the final week students present findings of the selected European countries. The analysis is supported by the elaboration of cases and actual discussions in the field. Furthermore, three movies/documentaries are shown and discussed to illustrate the social importance and the implications of the interrelationship between work, health, and well-being.

This course investigates the relationship between screen technologies and culturally-embedded screen practices, specifically in public and urban contexts. Screen phenomena beside the classical cinematic screen that are discussed and analyzed include: urban screens, mobile screens, VR and AR, video mapping and outdoor projections, interactive screen-based installations, and media architecture. The focus is on change and innovation, as well as a comparison of different and/or converging media forms. The perspective that is developed in this course is a historically-informed comparative analysis with an emphasis on moments when new spaces are created by new screens and screen-based constellations and their spatial design. For this, the reflection is on theories about the specificity of the cinematic and post-cinematic screen and on spatial, material, and performative aspects of screen spectatorship. Starting points for inquiries are offered by current debates about digitization and techno-cultural change, questions about medium specificity, hybridity, and convergence, and about new (and interactive) forms of spectatorship.

The goal of the course is to acquaint the participants with the central notions and principles of linguistics–a scientific study of human language that probes into the nature of language itself and seeks to answer the fundamental questions as to what language is and how it works. Students learn to use the formal tools of morphological and syntactic analyses and connect these to the position of language as a cognitive module. Under the view adopted, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology since it studies our competence (knowledge of natural language) which is, in turn, an aspect of our mind. The participants are acquainted with the leading ideas, central notions and fundamental principles of theoretical linguistics, concerned with the constructing of models of linguistic knowledge. The course particularly focuses on morphology and syntax as two sub-fields of theoretical linguistics. The course deals with the “nature-nurture” debate, searches for explanations of linguistic universals, but it also discusses the boundaries of natural language. It discusses how Universal Grammar operates and how natural language relates to other cognitive processes. A central role in the course is given to getting ourselves familiarized with the core structural principles of natural language. As the title of the course indicates, the starting point is the wonderment about the data from the participants' native language(s), but the goal is to analyze these data and compare them, in a systematic fashion, with data from other languages, both closely and distantly related to it.