Linguistics

This course examines how social and cultural factors influence language, and the role language plays in structuring and representing social categories across cultures. It examines how culture and language shape each other, particularly how language represents and enables culture and how cultures influence the form individual languages take. Specific topics include socially determined variation in language styles and registers, language varieties reflecting social class, gender, and ethnic group, factors affecting language choice such as, bi- and multilingualism, as well as the relation between language, culture, and thought, and universalist versus relativist views of language. Students also explore changes in language status over time.

This course focuses on the neural basis of language. It addresses how the brain works to process speaking, reading, and understanding of language in human beings. It emphasizes how neuro-imaging data are used to form the theories of language. It presents empirical evidence of conventional psycholinguistic studies and recent imaging findings. The aim of this course is to provide an integrative overview of how the components of the language system combine together. Students are required to take part weekly article presentations.

This course explores language and culture to uncover how they are related. Centering on Korean, it examines different languages and expressions and strives to discover the culture and the cultural motivation behind the language and language use.

This course examines the psycholinguistic processes that underlie the acquisition, understanding and production of speech as well as the organization of these processes in the brain. It discusses the traditional debates related to the genesis of language, its evolution and its acquisition. The course also reviews known speech processing models in the area of psycholinguistic studies that describe the processes of understanding and production of both oral and written discourse.

This course examines structural and cognitive aspects of meaning which are relevant to the description and theory of grammar. Examples will be drawn from Cantonese, Mandarin and English together with some other European and Asian languages.

This course presents, from a comparative perspective, the Basque language: a European language that does not belong to the Indo-European family, in its typology, the history of the language, etc. The linguistic system is compared to the neighboring Romance languages ​​(Catalan, Castilian, French, Occitan) and Latin. The course focuses on the descriptive linguistics of Basque which address the history and sociological aspects of the language, as well as its phonological system, dialect variation and standard, declension and the case system, syntax, ergativity, verbal system, allocutivity, etc. It addresses historical landmarks, synchrony and diachrony, the phonological system and diachronic variants, morphology, the question of number, marking and meaning, inflectional language, agreement (noun phrase and verb), morphosyntax of the noun, the role of word order and postpositions, the verbal system, and lexicon.

This course provides students an introduction to the basic principles of second language acquisition (SLA), a discipline that explores how humans learn additional languages after they have acquired their first language. The course offers a comprehensive understanding of SLA, mainly addressing the following topics: (a) theoretical accounts of first and second language acquisition, (b) various environmental, learner, and linguistic factors influencing SLA, and (c) characteristics of learner language as manifested in second language development. It also explores how theoretical claims and research findings of the field provide insights for second language teaching and learning