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.

This course introduces the sounds, grammar, vocabulary, genetic affiliation, and types of Japanese language, terms and concepts often used in Japanese linguistics.  It covers the basic information on Japanese language needed for students interested in teaching it as a second/foreign language or a native language. Japanese is also contrasted with other languages such as Korean, Chinese and English.

In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics by treating language as something produced by the human brain. From this change in perspective, the study of language became an indirect way of studying the human mind. In addition to opening new ways to approach the subject, this change also built a foundation for doing linguistics as a science. Grammar is seen not as a known set of rules that people need to study to learn but rather as the rules that result from the human mind trying to make sense of the language it is exposed to. This course looks at three sub-areas of linguistics from this perspective: morphology (the study of word structure), phonetics (the study of the physical sounds of language), and phonology (the study of the structure of sounds in language).

The globalization of the translation industry has accelerated the use of specialized tools in response to constraints such as time, cost, consistency and teamwork. This class offers students an opportunity for hands-on exploration of a number of industry-leading applications widely used today by key players in the translation industry to equip students with knowledge about translation working environment; translation memory technology; translation project management; translation workflow management; translation quality management; machine translation, and so forth. By using them to complete both individual and collaborative translation tasks, you will gain an understanding of: (1) An overview of the localization industry in which the tools are used; (2) Their potential and limitations; (3) Methods of evaluating their performance, and (4) How translation quality are evaluated in the translation industry.

This course analyzes the history and dialectology of Latin American Spanish, with special focus on Chilean history and linguistic documentation of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Topics include: the concept of Latin American Spanish-- unity and diversity, Latin American Spanish and Atlantic Spanish; the influence of Andalusia and genetic matrices; diastratic-diatopic variation and zoning; historical aspects-- periodization of Latin American Spanish; koineization and standardization processes; linguistic contact-- indigenous substrata and immigrant languages.

This course delves into the process of language acquisition. The course looks at different models and theories that have arisen from the different schools of thought. It explores the different processes of first language acquisition and stages of development (phonological, lexical, syntactical), before moving onto the cognitive framework of language processing (parsing). The next area of focus is bilingualism and second language acquisition. Students are introduced to different forms of bilingualism and the issues raised in second language acquisition. They are also introduced to language in the brain, speech pathologies, and other communication systems.

Language and our thinking capacity are closely related. This course explores the ways in which language shapes; assists, or hinders our thinking. Mastering one of the main cognitive tools in our possession means mastering our own linguistic minds.