Appreciating and being able to explain the range of variety of spoken and written language among various peoples of the world is an essential key to understanding human culture and diversity. This course will focus on two central aspects of language, sounds and structures. In particular, we will examine how languages may differ in their sound systems and structures as well as the common aspects in the sound systems and structures of all human languages. There is no pre-requisite for this course. Introduction to Linguistics.
Nothing is more distinctly human than our ability to use language.
This course is an introduction to the methods which linguists have developed in the process of analyzing and describing human languages. Our study will draw on examples from a large number of the languages of the world. We will look at the sounds of language, how they are produced, and how they are patterned into words. We will study the diverse ways in which individual languages approach the processes of word and sentence formation, while we try to decide if there are processes which are universal to all human languages. Exercises will be weekly problem-solving assignments, involving analysis of phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, or historical data from various languages.