APLING 701 - Advanced Linguistics I

3 Credit(s)

Description:
“Advanced Linguistics I” is the first in a two course sequence of courses that focusses ont eh four main levels of linguistic structure: syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology. Because of the complexity of each of these levels, they will be presented in two separate courses. The first course covers two related areas: syntax (the study of the essential components of a sentence) and semantics (the study of meaning). Although meaning covers all areas of linguistic structure, linguists have debated over the years the boundary between structure and meaning. Therefore, the course opens with a discussion of syntax, describing how a sentence is structured from the word up to the level of the sentence. In the second part of the course, the focus shefts more generally to meaning, helping students understand that a noun, for instance, can be discussed both in terms of its structure (e.g. the noun child can follow the or an) as well as its meaning (e.g. the noun child express the meaning of “humanness”). Although the primary focus of the course will be on English, other languages will be introduced both to compare their relationship to English and to expose studets to the structure of some of the most commonly spoken languages in the world-languages that many students learning English as a second or foreign language will speak as native languages.

037750:1

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