Linguistics

This course provides an introduction to the literary culture of the medieval period, highlighting some of the key cultural issues of this era.  Students orient themselves in this long period (roughly from 600 to 1500) by looking at a range of texts and genres - poetry, prose, drama, lyric - from the early medieval as well as the later medieval periods. In exploring the various locations of the Middle Ages, students consider borders, boundaries, and zones between different places and periods. 

This course presents theories on the diversity of languages. Through a theoretical approach, it focuses on the relationship between language, culture, and geographical environment to study the representation of the world in relation to languages. The first part of the course deals with the categories of linguistic variation and the importance of translation and language learning. It presents characteristics common to languages or invariants, investigating the universals of language. The course then introduces the genetic classification of languages and revisits its history and related theories. It also discusses the typological classification and the areal method. The first part of the course serves as a theoretical foundation to lay the groundwork for the second part on sociolinguistic structures, which studies the contact of languages to explain the formation of mixed dialects.

This course is designed to identify and discuss basic concepts and problems in the area of translation studies as well as provide an overview of translation as a profession. The course is not language specific. It will however have a theoretical and pragmatic component with specific hands-on activities.

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.