Linguistics

The course covers the study of semantics, focusing on the meaning of words and expressions in Spanish from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Students explore lexical meaning, ambiguity, semantic relationships, cognitive semantics, and mechanisms of semantic change, while developing vocabulary, sentence construction, and critical reflection on the Spanish language.

This course focuses on four specific aspects of child language development in depth: the acquisition of syntax, the role of the environment and interaction in language development, language development and education, and atypical language development. It discusses and evaluates competing theories of language development and critically evaluate current research within the four areas outlined above. The course contains a practical component in which students use child language research tools to conduct their own research on corpus data. The analysis involves quantitative data and statistical analysis.

This course systematically examines the social, cultural, and pragmatic factors of language in context. Having a grasp of how these factors interact in a given language and in intercultural communication is crucial to the development of mutual understanding in the global world. The course explores the concepts of language, ideology, power, and identity on a micro-interactional (family, workplace, educational, legal settings) as well as macro-interactional level (language in the public sphere, in politics and the media). Seeing that the course participants are global citizens themselves, their viewpoints, experiences and opinions are crucial to developing an understanding of communication in the globalized world. Aside from being introduced to theoretical concepts, ideas and state-of-the-art studies in the field, one of the main aims of this course is for its participants to be able to discuss and analyze language from a sociolinguistic perspective. The course discusses topics including the intricate links between language and society; the concepts related to language change and variation, politeness, and impoliteness across cultures, and language ideologies; issues concerning the sociolinguistics of globalization and intercultural communication; the role of language in various spheres of everyday life (politics, media, health and education, economy); how cultural context affects the use and the (mis)interpretation of language; communication strategies that come into play in intercultural interactions in today’s globalized world; and conduct their own preliminary analysis of linguistic landscapes in their surroundings and apply the concepts presented in class with understanding the complexity of everyday language use.

This course is a general overview of the interactions of language and other higher mental functions, such as pattern recognition and problem solving. In particular, it goes through solving various types of linguistic puzzles, and facilitate understanding of how knowledge of language and general reasoning interact in the process of problem-solving. Through this course, students are expected to achieve the basic understanding of the logical structure as encoded in natural languages, and to gain practical experience through hands-on practice with the real data. Prerequisite: Introduction to Linguistics.

How do we acquire language? How are we to interpret the fact that language use varies according to geography, social class, gender, and context? Why do languages die? What is the impact of immigration on language attitudes, language acquisition, and language transmission? This course attempts to provide the beginnings of answers to such questions, as well as many others relating to language, the individual, and society.

This course is an introduction to the study of meaning in natural language (semantics and pragmatics) and to some basic logical concepts and their application therein.