Linguistics

In this course students learn, for example, that using language in a certain way may result in a more advantageous outcome for the speaker and by contrast, that certain other ways of using language may be considered law-breaking. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required but having some competence in another language in addition to English is an advantage. This course is interdisciplinary and students learn about the ways in which a number of disciplines are related to one another, including linguistics, the law, criminology, and psychology. 

This course explores how humans represent, comprehend, and produce language. Students examine core properties of mental representations and processes involved in understanding language, and how linguistic processes unfold in real time. Topics ranging from speech perception and word recognition to sentence and discourse comprehension. Students learn the basics of experimental design and core experimental techniques.

The course gives a basic understanding of concepts within the field of semantics and pragmatics using problem oriented exercises to highlight different traditions, including structural-typological semantics, logical semantics, cognitive semantics, and pragmatic theories of meaning. The course addresses philosophical issues such as: What is meaning? What is the relationship between meaning, world, and mind? Emphasis is placed on more linguistic issues such as: Do different languages have different systems of meaning? What is the relationship between the meaning and structure of language? Is meaning dependent on context?

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale Program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. This course engages the role of language—both as a symbolic code and as a material tool—in the spreading of late/neoliberal capitalism. While most analyses of the world’s current order tend to focus on political and economic aspects, this course explores how certain ways of speaking and using language may partake in producing capitalist forms of reasoning and practical conduct. Throughout the course, students develop tools to analyze the discursive and semiotic forms that characterize our everyday lives. Students learn to view linguistic interactions and graphic artifacts (i.e., street signage, typefaces, letterforms, brands, logos, and other types of graphic media) as socially and politically meaningful semiotic technologies that shape our worlds. Students learn how to analyze new protocols of discourse that characterize our everyday lives: the customer satisfaction survey, the service encounter, the checklist, the logbook, the flowchart, the electoral mission statement, the training session, etc. Despite their apparent ordinariness, these discursive genres/textual artifacts are key for the production of the self-improving and self-reflexive subjects required by the regimes of moral accountability and the forms of market rationality that characterize our contemporary moment. While reading ethnographic analyses of specific technologies of discourse, students engage broader questions: How pervasive are neoliberal structures of practice? To what extent can neoliberalism be represented as an overarching and coherent global trend generated by the homogenizing forces of Western Capitalism? Is our moral and affective experience completely shaped by the extension of economic rationality to all areas of life? The course shows how, within a regime of advanced capitalism, life and labor unfold through complex interplays of semiotic codes, affective registers, and material objects.

Taiwan has formed a multilingual society rich in languages, an asset accumulated over a long history. This phenomenon was also due to Taiwan’s encounters with different cultures at different historical stages: that between Austronesians and Dutch; Austronesians and Han Chinese; Austronesians and Han Chinese and Japanese, to Taiwan natives and Chinese immigrants in 1949. This course enables students to gain a full understanding between Taiwanese language and historical development and social phenomena, as well as develop an enthusiasm for Taiwanese language. 

This course serves as a general introduction to psycholinguistics. It covers basic areas such as neurolinguistics, speech perception, word recognition, lexical ambiguity, sentence comprehension, language acquisition, and production. Prerequisite: Students must have completed the course, Introduction to Linguistics.

This course focuses on some central topics and arguments in the philosophy of mind and language in the tradition of analytic philosophy. The main aim is to engage in detail with arguments and texts that have played a central role in contemporary discussions. Topics include: the nature of linguistic and mental content; the nature of thought and its relation to linguistic understanding; what is reference and meaning and what are their relations to intentionality and concepts; the relation between our inferential and representational abilities and the nature of our rationality; the nature and our knowledge of our mental states; the relation between the physical and the mental domains. Students acquire an understanding of central topics in the philosophy of mind and language and they will be in a position to explain and to engage competently orally and in writing with these problems. More specifically they will be in a position to: master the central concepts in the theory of language and mind; understand the philosophical positions involved on the debates; understand the arguments in favor or against the relevant philosophical theses; have some appreciation of the significance of these issues for other areas of philosophy.

This course examines some central topics in the philosophies of language. We discuss core concepts such as that of truth, meaning, validity, inference. We then focus on the normative role of truth and validity in relation to reasoning. Although this course does not presuppose any specific competence in formal logic, some basic acquaintance in elementary formal logic may help.