Linguistics

This course introduces perspectives on language. It starts with very fundamental questions and assumptions about the nature of language itself and proceed by analyzing basic linguistic structures of the languages course participants know. The course aims to discover that the comparison of languages leads us to linguistic categories some consider universal (same categories in all languages no matter how different they appear to be on the surface), asking the questions: If all languages are more or less alike than why is it so hard to learn a foreign language?  This course considers perspectives from the fields of psychology or anthropology gives us clues, thereby looking at some of the findings the science of language owes to other sciences.

This course introduces the lexicographical approach implemented in language dictionaries as well as different types of relation and construction of meaning in lexicon. The course covers synonyms, homonyms, antonyms, hyponymy, hyperonymy, derivatives and compounds, and the phenomena of multiple meanings. It provides an opportunity to practice categorizing and organizing the uses of words in the form of mock dictionary entries.

This course analyzes language from diverse perspectives (biological, cognitive, social, and cultural) and discusses its fundamental questions, such as its evolution, variation, acquisition, and relationship with other semiotic systems. 

This course provides an introduction to the various fields within English linguistics, including theoretical, interdisciplinary, and applied branches, and helps students understand what types of linguistic phenomena are of interest and how such phenomena are observed and analyzed in each of the fields. Topics include phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax/grammar, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, neurolinguistics, first/second language acquisition, dialectology/sociolinguistics, cultural linguistics, corpus linguistics, natural language processing/artificial intelligence, and other related topics. 

In recent years, there has been growing interest in sign language along with increasing social awareness that sign language is a real language worthy of systematic study. This course is a general education survey course introduces students to the many different social and communicative aspects of signing found around the world in deaf and non-deaf communities. Even hearing communities such as aboriginal and monastic ones have found the need to communicate visually when, for whatever reason, speech cannot be used.

By the end of this course, students are expected to: Learning Goals:
1) Have acquired insight into a different visual world of communication.

2) Have increased awareness of changes in attitudes regarding disability, identity, and culture.

3) Have a better understanding of educational and social welfare practices affecting the deaf in Japan and around the world.

This course deals with syntactic change in the history of English (in comparison, in particular, with German and French). Phenomena to be discussed will include the loss of inflectional morphology, the loss of free word order, the change from OV to VO word order, the loss of verb movement and the development of do-support, and the shift from a general verb-second language to a residual verb-second language.

This foundation course introduces the basic knowledge of modern linguistics and language teaching. Language teachers must have profound knowledge about the sounds, grammar, vocabulary and semantics of the target language as well as deep understanding about its use in different contexts. 

This course introduces theoretical and technical issues on how languages work, and how one can utilize it for oneself. It provides an overview of core concepts in linguistics relevant to language education, exploring issues related to one’s own language learning and bilingualism.

The course introduces students to the core concepts of applied linguistics - history, origin, and scope. It explores how linguistic knowledge can be used to understand and address real-world language and communication issues.  Students will examine language processing, language disorders, and multilingualism from cognitive, social, and educational perspectives. The course also focuses on identifying contemporary language-related social problems, analyzing their causes, and proposing interdisciplinary solutions.

The course focuses on the constituents of the simple sentence and their categorization (the different classes of words), as well as on the morphosyntactic relations within the simple sentence. The nominal group and its constituents are studied more particularly. It is about learning to identify words from their characteristics in terms of their form (morphology), their meaning (semantics), and their combinatorial possibility (distribution).