Linguistics

This course situates an early Chinese understanding of the body within a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective. It trains analytical thinking and academic writing through bodily discussions. It introduces classical texts with contemporary theories from the fields of social epistemology, communication studies, social anthropology, disabled studies, and phenomenology. It shows students different ways of asking questions, finding evidence, forms of reasoning, and perspectives of discussions. Active and ethical engagement with AI reading and writing is also essential to this course.

The course explores how frameworks, theories, and models from a number of different areas, including cognitive neuropsychology and psycholinguistics, inform clinical assessment and remediation of aphasia. Findings from basic science, neurophysiology, imaging, and speech and language therapy are linked to increase our knowledge of the effects of the rehabilitative interventions at the level of the brain as well as their functional impact. Both emerging and established rehabilitative approaches are highlighted.

Psycholinguistics tests different theories of the production, perception, and acquisition of language by using various methods, such as reaction time experiments, brain activity measurements, misarticulation analysis, and corpus analysis. This course provides an introduction to these theories and methods. Furthermore, the factors that affect our perception, production, and acquisition of a first or second language are studied. The course introduces the principles for conducting and assessing a psycholinguistic experiment and includes an exercise in conducting such an experiment.

The analysis of communication on social media is rapidly becoming a key-area in (socio)linguistics and discourse studies. This course introduces students to the main methods of data collection and analysis of language and discourse for a variety of social media contexts. The course combines familiarization with frameworks of analysis with practical steps on how to approach data. A variety of case-studies of social media afforded practices (e.g. sharing, tagging, Like & Follow) ranging from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter illustrate the role of a range of language and multimodal resources in presenting ourselves and relating with others online. 

This course introduces students to the principal findings, models, and research methods in the field of second language acquisition. The course surveys general issues such as the role of the native language, the effects on the second language on the first, universals, age, input and interaction, and processing, as well as characteristics of the acquisition of phonology, lexicon, and syntax in second language learners. The empirical component of the course provides students with experience in designing and carrying out studies in second language acquisition.

In this course, students are exposed to contemporary research on variation in a diverse range of languages, and are expected to engage with research covering some of the following topics: complex linguistic data from a range of languages (not solely English); diachronic processes of change and the social factors involved in them; patterns of synchronic, inter-dialectal variation in specific present-day languages; language-internal and language-external factors affecting variation; sound change and phonetic variation; patterns of variation and change affecting morphosyntax; and empirical methodologies including experimental research and statistical analysis techniques.

The course deals with current interdisciplinary research on the origins of language. Focus is placed on the relationship between biological and cultural evolution and physiological and neural conditions for language from the perspective of evolution. Furthermore, the course addresses animal communication, experiments on language acquisition in primates and other animals, the relationship between mind and language and different hypotheses on the origins of language and evaluation of these on the basis of empirical evidence.

This course is specialized for international students. This class studies typological variations between languages spoken in different areas of the world whose linguistic roots are diverse. It examines the similarities and differences between these languages and how they show in several conceptual fields (spatial relations, movement, sensory perception); the link between language, culture, and cognition; as well as the effects of typological variations on the way we conceptualize our experiences with the world around us. This course draws on linguistic, anthropological, and cognitive studies carried out in different languages and cultures around the world.

This course explores language structure, in particular, patterns of sentence structure (syntax) and of meaning (semantics), from a cross-linguistic perspective. Concepts discussed include: grammatical categories, semantic relations, grammatical relations, constituency, and the relationship between grammar and the lexicon. A key feature of the course is its emphasis on the evidence and argumentation that bears upon the representation of structure and principles of grammar that we postulate. The course provides the foundation for the study of advanced courses investigating linguistic structure.

This seminar provides students with a comprehensive insight into the evolution of language, encompassing both biological and cultural changes. We will explore thought-provoking questions based on language evolution theories, such as the distinctions between human and animal communication and the reasons behind humans' ability to acquire a vast vocabulary compared to our closest ancestors. Through an exploration of neurocognitive experimental research and incorporating insights from artificial neurocomputational modeling, we will investigate the underlying mechanisms in the human mind and brain that govern language processing, usage, and evolution. Additionally, we will place particular emphasis on linguistic pragmatics, a sub-discipline that examines language as a tool of communication in social contexts, drawing upon foundational concepts from analytical philosophy and linguistic pragmatic models. Throughout these discussions, we will explore factors such as social interaction, turn-taking, and the establishment of common ground. Furthermore, there will be planned visits to the electroencephalography (EEG) laboratory to provide hands-on experience with neurocognitive experiments, as well as a visit to the aphasia therapy center of the Brain Language Unit at the Freie Universität Berlin.