Linguistics

The course discusses the problems, methods, and results of sociolinguistics, in particular the social aspects that influence linguistic change. It explores the incidence of social and cultural factors in the acquisition and use of language, as well as on the sociolinguistic status of Indigenous languages and the linguistic planning of the different Latin American countries. 

It is generally assumed that language, culture, and our way of thinking are related. The relation, which is often called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or linguistic relativity, has been the subject of serious philosophical, anthropological and scientific inquiry. Taking advantage of the extensive bilingualism in Singapore, this course selects a few salient grammatical features and critically examines them within the broader cultural and/or cognitive contexts. Topics discussed include pluralisation, classifier, tense and aspect, kinship, polysemy, metaphor and bilingual acquisition. Issues related to translation are also discussed.

This course examines the most salient aspects of Occitan and observes how the same linguistic diasystem is realized in the form of dialects with marked tonalities and musicality. This approach makes it possible to implement and extend the phonetic skills acquired for French in the first year as well as some syntax points. This course constitutes a practical introduction to Romantic studies, as Occitan is the autochthonous Romance language covering most of Southern France and the vehicle of an abundant literature.

This course provides an introduction to contemporary approaches to the study of the varieties of the English language observed across nations, regions, social groups, and contexts. The two major goals of the course are to illustrate the concepts of sociolinguistics that are essential to studying the expansion and resulting diversity of English and to examine the social, cultural, and linguistic impact of English in countries where English is taught and used as a second or foreign language.

This course examines how speech sounds are organized and patterned typologically; how speech sounds are processed mentally; how we learn the sound systems of language and communicate with each other.