Course Details
Country:
Netherlands
Institution:
Free University of Amsterdam
Course Title:
Introduction to Linguistics
Course Number:
L_AABACIW103
Course Description:
Course Objective
The goal of this course is to provide students with elementary knowledge of formal linguistics and of language use. At the end of this course, students will be able to correctly use basic linguistic terminology and they will be familiar with the basics of the linguistic domains of language acquisition and language disorders, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, language variation and language contact, semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics. They will also be aware of the role that linguistics plays in society, such as in speech/ language therapy and in educational environments. Students will also be able to perform basic linguistic analyses on language datasets from languages they do not speak.
Course Content
In this course, we will study the basics of linguistics and applied linguistics. We start out with studying the language acquisition processes young children go through. We will focus on the developmental processes in sound, word and sentence acquisition. We will also pay some attention to language disorders, such as developmental disorders and aphasia. Taking language acquisition as a starting point, we will then study the systems for sound production, word formation and sentence construction as universal properties of languages. In our phonetics and phonology classes we will study how sounds are pronounced and perceived and how meaning is mapped onto sounds in different languages. We then move on to how words and sentences are formed in a number of languages and how this helps us categorize languages into families (topics: morphology and syntax). In the fourth week, we focus on how languages change from generation to generation and how language contact causes regional language change. In these first four weeks we will study language examples from English and Dutch but also from typologically completely different languages such as Austronesian languages and Amazonian languages. In week five, we will focus less on the language system itself and more on language use. We will study semantics (the mapping of meaning onto words or clauses) and pragmatics (the unwritten rules of language use). In the final week, we will focus on computational linguistics and we will study how computers learn and use language and how this differs from the way humans learn and use language. At the end of the course, students will have become acquainted with an enormous number of fascinating features of language systems and language use.
Language:
English
Approved Equivalent:
LING 306
Attachment Files:
