Linguistics

The course introduces students to Relational Frame Theory (RFT) as an approach to understanding human psychology. It familiarizes students with the philosophical and theoretical underpinning of RFT and explains the core behavioral processes implicated by this approach. It examines up to date RFT-based research into diverse areas of human language and cognition including cognitive development, motivation, problem-solving, and analogical reasoning.

This course examines the fundamental concepts, units, instruments, and methods in the study of segmental and suprasegmental phonetics. Topics include: phonetics in the communication process; articulatory phonetics; phonetic alphabets and transcription; acoustic phonetics; perceptual phonetics; integration of the three branches of phonetics in the study of segmental phonetics; prosody.

This course examines bilingualism and bilingual people including the acquisition and learning of two languages, personality and intelligence, and variables of cognitive development. It also discusses bilingual education programs for linguistic minorities and majorities as well as multiculturalism.

This course fosters students' understanding of the fast-emerging trans-national English-speaking culture by exploring such socio-linguistic themes as language and gender, language and race as well as cultural diversity. It provides students with skills needed to make them into international citizens and leaders in today's global society. This course introduces how English has become a global language, what changes and variations English has come through, and what issues such changes have generated. The English language is playing a pivotal role as an important tool to communicate in today’s globalized world. As it spreads out throughout the world, linguistic changes have appeared in different varieties of English and the new varieties are received differently in different parts of the world. Students learn about linguistic descriptions of the new varieties of English, attitudes towards New Englishes, and issues related to learning and teaching of the English language. In addition, students take a peek at what
is happening to languages whose speakers are decreasing in numbers (as opposed to English whose number of speakers is increasing).

In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics by treating language as something produced by the human brain. From this change in perspective, the study of language became an indirect way of studying the human mind. In addition to opening up new ways to approach the subject, this change also built a foundation for doing linguistics as a science. Grammar is seen not as a known set of rules that people need to study in order to learn but rather as the rules that result from the human mind trying to make sense of the language it is exposed to. In this class we will look at two sub-areas of linguistics from this perspective: syntax (the study of phrase structure in language) and semantics (the study of linguistic meaning).