Linguistics

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. 

This course observes how speech is orchestrated to a choreography of the human body. It examines how meanings, abstract or concrete, are not only produced but actually performed on the interactional stage. The course provides an opportunity to observe facial expressions and co-speech gestures in silent movies and explore how speech production necessarily comes with gestural action. This multimodal course combines formal research seminars, animated classroom discussions, creative workshop sessions, and film screenings.

The course examines how the English language varies in use according to contextual factors. By applying theories and analytical frameworks from the fields of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, students discover how speakers and writers use the English language to communicate meanings, carry out actions, signal membership in speech communities, and achieve styles in talk and writing. In the pragmatics portion of the course, the ways in which meaning is context-dependent and the ways in which speakers achieve goals using language are considered. In the sociolinguistics portion of the course, the linguistic resources with which speakers show their connection to a given community and express identity are analyzed. Students use primarily qualitative research methods to complete assignments and short research papers. Examination is done in the form of oral presentations, written assignments, and written final examinations.

The course offers an introduction to syntax, the fundamental theories of syntactic analysis, and the methodologies to apply theories. Students utilize these methodologies in authentic case studies.

This course provides a broad understanding of linguistics by examining the historical changes in the objects and methodology of its research. Following a historical path, the course explores the theoretical background and characteristics of each school, up to European and American structuralism and modern transformational grammar.