Linguistics

This course introduces into the linguistic sub-discipline pragmatics. Students examine how meaning emerges in context, and how this contextual meaning can be distinguished from the literal meaning of a linguistic expression. The range of topics includes assertion, presupposition, implicature, and speech acts.

This course familiarizes students with basic conceptual frameworks that underpin the study of English language in use, which constitutes useful knowledge for their future teaching practice. The course explores the intricacies of English language practices in diverse regional, social, cultural, and interpersonal contexts, with emphasis on practical knowledge and skills acquisition that enables students to develop research designs, collect and analyze language data, and apply theoretical frameworks to their findings. Through student-led discussions, presentations, and mini research projects, the course deepens one's understanding of the complexities of English language use and its practical applications in language education. This course is recommended for the students who are considering a graduate thesis project in the field of English language studies, as well as those aspiring to become English language teachers. 
 

Language anxiety and linguistic insecurity are central topics in multilingual and transcultural contexts. In this seminar, students investigate the causes and effects of language anxiety, in language acquisition as well as in the day to day. The class looks at different forms of linguistic insecurity and language anxiety that are affected by social norms, language ideologies, and individual experiences. The goal of the seminar is to develop a critical understanding of this phenomenon and how to approach linguistic insecurity. The readiness to work with research literature in English is required. Students need to take this seminar alongside the lecture "Second Language Acquisition and Multilingualism".

This course offers a comprehensive overview of key questions that drive current discussions about the links between the brain, cognitive processes, and language while also examining language as a tool for expressing social cognition. Students will explore various topics within Psycholinguistics, focusing on language comprehension and production, and will analyze how language assists in interpreting cultural phenomena.

This seminar investigates morphological patterns in which prosody plays a central role for word structure, such as clippings/ truncation (fab < fabulous, veggie < vegetarian), -er comparatives (red - redder, conventional - *conventionaler but more conventional), infixation (uni-bloody-versity, Minne-fuckin'-sota) or reduplication (mish-mash). Using English and other languages as a data source, the course introduces Optimality Theory as a framework for modelling the interaction of morphology and phonology in these constructions.

This course offers an in-depth exploration of quantitative text analysis methods for studying international relations. Students engage with advanced computational techniques, including text classification, topic modeling, and network analysis, to systematically examine textual data. The class places emphasis on methodological rigor, critical interpretation of results, and the application of these tools to address key research questions in the field. It is designed to equip students with the skills needed to conduct independent research using text as data.

This course introduces students to the key ideas in the study of language in society, with a focus on sociolinguistic phenomena which are observable in London. The course takes a survey approach, ensuring that the breadth of sociolinguistic scholarship is explored. The course is research driven, and students are exposed to the range of methodologies used in the discipline; students have the chance to carry out a project on dialectology and language attitudes within class sessions, and are taken a field trip to photograph the linguistic landscape in Brick Lane, China Town, and Camden. 

This course is an introduction to linguistic pragmatics, an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics which studies the relationship between language form and language use. It seeks to understand what it is to use language or what we do when we use language (Verschueren 1999). The course is divided into three units: the basic theoretical concepts in pragmatics, such as Grice’s maxims of conversation, conversational implicatures, deixis, and speech acts; key analytical (and contentious) issues such as salience and implicit meaning by analyzing different types of discourse; and the analysis of conversational interaction. Here, students explore such phenomena as turn-taking and preference structure, politeness phenomena, formulaic language, humor, and pragmatic/discourse markers. 

This course familiarizes students with the fundamental semantic notion of cohesion. Indeed, it is cohesion that makes it possible to form a discursive whole, whether written or oral. The main cohesive links defined by Halliday and Hasan's COHESION IN ENGLISH (1976) are reviewed, defined and discussed: reference, substitution, ellipsis, the main types of reiteration and comparison. Conjunction and collocation are omitted. Each lesson is devoted to recognizing, locating, and activating these various links.

This course examines how linguistic forms and literary devices are related to aesthetic effects and ideological functions. It will analyze and discuss how the choice and the patterning of words, sounds and images orchestrate to embody, mediate and elicit feelings and thoughts, and views and values. Topics include: towards characterizing literary linguistics; collocation, deviation and word play; prosody, parallelism and performance; discourse into discourse; narration and representation of speech and thought; reader positioning and response.