Linguistics

This course explores how language appears and is employed in popular cultural productions, including songs, films, advertisements, and more. It considers the changing nature of language and how different media use language to tell stories, express ideas, and have effects on their readers, viewers, or listeners. The course analyzes specific works for its language choices and its circulation; its differences in oral and written contexts; and the constellation of associations that can be created across time, space, and media. 
 

This course aims to do the following: 

1) Develop skills and knowledge one has acquired in foundational Media, Communication and Culture courses.
2) Introduce a range of interesting popular cultural productions and increase one’s cultural literacy in the process.
3) Recognize that scholarly inquiry and appreciation does not exclude popular culture and that they are worthy of discussion, analysis, and aesthetic appreciation.

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center Director or Liaison Officer. Specific internships vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. A substantial paper or series of reports is required. Units vary depending on the contact hours and method of assessment. The internship may be taken during one or more terms but the units cannot exceed a total of 12.0 for the year.

This course introduces basic concepts in linguistics from the perspective of language documentation. Based on data from less-studied languages, the course explore subfields of linguistics, including but not limited to phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. Most data will come from fieldwork conducted by the instructor using authentic data. Target languages are Xitsonga and Tshivenda (South Africa), Kiribati (Kiribati), Drenjongke (India), Burmese (Myanmar), Zhuang and Yi (China) as well as Japanese dialects spoken in Tohoku and Okinawa.

The course covers the following topics:

-Introduction to language documentation
-Issues concerning endangered languages
-Phonetic and phonological documentation
-Documenting cultural materials (Mid-term presentation)
-Morphological documentation
-Syntactic and prosodic documentation

This is an introductory course in psycholinguistics, which explores the cognitive processes underlying language production, comprehension, and acquisition. It covers the major concepts and issues of the discipline which encompass theoretical claims, research methodology and findings.

This course explores the field and concept of assessment in foreign languages, analysis and use of language reference frameworks, the evolution in the treatment of linguistic competencies, and the main methods of evaluation in foreign languages.

• Basic English skills in the field of linguistics in general and Chinese language studies in specific.

• Topics
1. Introduction
2. The History of Chinese
3. The Chinese Script
4. The classical and literary languages
5. The rise and development of the written vernacular 6. The modern standard language I
7. The modern standard language II
8. Dialectal variation in North and Central China

9. The dialects of the Southeast 10. Languages and society

10. Languages and society

This course introduces the field of language acquisition, which involves the scientific study of human languages, and applied linguistics. It covers the different types of linguistic knowledge (words, sentence patterns, sound patterns), how linguistic knowledge is applied in different cultures, how people learn languages, and the different rates of acquisition and approaches (cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics) to second language acquisition.

This course provides an introduction to the analysis of discourse and dialogue. It discusses the major theoretical and methodological areas of study in discourse analysis from functional and socio-cognitive perspectives as well as applications in mediated, multimodal, and computational/corpus-assisted settings. 

How are words used to change people’s minds? What makes us pay attention to someone’s words, sung, spoken, or written? Does the spoken (or sung) word have more impact than the written one? What makes someone click on the headline of an online publication? Is an image more powerful with or without a linguistic frame? Can language be more persuasive than an image? Is persuasion, like humor, culture-specific? These are questions that will be explored in this course about how rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion, operates in contemporary society. 
 

The course aims to: 

(1) To develop an awareness of how language is used to persuade and manipulate by looking at rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion, and recognizing how a range of rhetorical devices, including repetition and metaphor, are employed in popular songs, and memorable advertisements, headlines and tweets, political speeches, and film titles; and 

(2) To practice the use of rhetorical devices in making language more persuasive.

This course provides a general introduction to language and linguistics.