Linguistics

This course is an upper-division introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of human language, and to what characterizes human language and makes it different from other animal communication systems and other human cognitive systems. The course introduces the different components that human language is made of and how linguists investigate them. In particular, it looks at sounds (and signs) and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to words (phonetics, phonology, and morphology); it looks at words and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to sentences (syntax); finally, it looks at how words and sentences can be used to convey meaning (semantics and pragmatics). While doing so, it emphasizes the innate cognitive aspects of human language but also touches on those aspects that are sensitive to culture and society and determine some of the variation and differences among human languages. Some of the question the course addresses include: what is a language and what does knowledge of a language consist of; are human languages fundamentally different from other systems of animal communication; are some languages better than others; what's a dialect and how does it compare to a language; how do children acquire language, does our knowledge of language derive entirely from experience, or do humans come “hardwired” with certain innate capacities for language; how do languages develop and change over time? For practical reasons, English is the primary source of data and examples for the course for practical reasons as the lingua franca. Still, data from other languages are presented throughout the course, with special attention to Italian, other languages (aka "dialects") spoken in Italy, and languages spoken by the students in the course.

This course provides an account of the structure of Modern Scots dialects and Scottish English by examining variation in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexis from diachronic, synchronic and geographical perspectives.

The course focuses on the conceptual apparatus regarding linguistic studies based on authentic data. Emphasis is placed on the role of linguistic corpora for language analysis with the support of computational tools. The course highlights methodologies for developing language teaching materials in advanced learning environments. Course topics: what is a corpus, how to use it and the kind of information it provides; parameters for corpus design; representativeness; syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis; concordances, collocations, and lexical association indexes; annotations; electronic texts, coding, mark-up format, and conversion methods; how to collect electronic texts; corpus access and text retrieval; case study: the corpora CORIS/CODIS, BoLC e DiaCORIS; web as corpus; laboratory: querying a tagged corpus; procedures for reading concordances; introduction to machine learning; part-of-speech tagging–parsing and formal grammars; lexical semantics–wordnets; laboratory of computational linguistics.

This course explores aspects of the English noun phrase, namely quantifiers, and aspects of the English verb phrase, i.e. modality. Text-based analyses enable students to acquire a better understanding of these particular areas of studies and become more proficient in translation.