Linguistics

This course studies the fundamental concepts of phonetic and phonological theories. The course begins with a review of classical taxonomic phonology and then moves on to the study of modern phonological theories.  

The course also covers practical phonetics, and students will practice producing speech sounds from languages spoken around the world, using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Examples will be presented mainly from English and Japanese to help students understand the theories, but examples from various other languages will also be used to further explain the theoretical concepts. Students are expected to have a basic knowledge of phonetics and phonology. 

In this course, students observe, understand, and analyze linguistic phenomena specific to Spanish, in the phonetic and phonological domain.

This course examines the structure of the Russian language in phonetic and phonological aspects and focuses on the relationship between spelling, sound, and the other aspects of linguistic analysis. The course covers Russian vowel and consonant systems, the phonological system and morphology, the relationship between phonetics and spelling, phonetic transcription, the intonation system, and practical phonetics and orthoepy.

This course provides third and final year students with the theoretical and practical knowledge of diachronic studies of language, or historical linguistics, enabling them to understand how some historical changes in language can be described and explained. This course can also aid in conducting research for graduation theses and, for some, prospective postgraduate studies. 

In this course we will study code-switching, the alternation between two or more languages (or two or more varieties of a language) within the same discourse. We will relate code-switching to both individual and societal multilingualism, investigate the phenomenon from a structural perspective as well from sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives, see how theories of code-switching have developed over time, and apply a variety of theoretical perspectives to the analysis of examples of code switching involving a variety of language pairs.

This course focuses on speech act theories, language behavior, context of speech in conversation, and transmission of meaning in regards to the grammatical and lexical knowledge of the listener and speaker. It considers how language acquires meaning in context and discusses formal models to explain how these meanings are conveyed between cooperative interlocutors. The course focuses on exploring a range of theoretical and experimental research on topics in pragmatics, applies these concepts to word learning, and introduces notable researchers who have made contributions to this area.

This course deals with the internal and external history of French. It examines how Latin was transformed to give birth to French and the deep grammatical characteristics that distinguish the two languages. The course also focuses on the survival of Latin as an intellectual language and the competition between Latin and French, particularly during the Renaissance. The history of spelling is also covered.