Linguistics

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.

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.