3 Special Topics Courses (LING 399) Offered this Fall
The department of Linguistics is offering 3 special topics course this coming Fall, 2014.
Dr. Sally Rice will be teaching LING 399-A2, the topic is Interactional Linguistics. The course will be on Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00-12:20 in room ASH 4-70. Below is a description of the course and course outcomes.
At heart, language is contextualized, multi-modal, and interactional. In linguistics, sadly, we tend to study de-contextualized meanings and forms from written representations, which are usually stripped of the speaker, of sound, or the actual usage context. This kind of linguistics idealizes what language is and often ends up theorizing about human language on the basis of invented linguistic examples.This course covers topics such as intonation, the gestures and changes in gaze and body posture that accompany speech, syntactic mirroring, the dynamics of interruptions and repairs, turn-taking, and--most fundamentally--how phonemes, morphemes, parts-of-speech, and sentence patterns aren't the whole of linguistic analysis. We will survey major studies, learn how to do transcription of real conversation (both audio and video), and see how an interactional approach may help with language documentation, language teaching, and even linguistic theory.
By contrast, interactional linguistics is an emerging sub-discipline that puts speakers, their bodies (gesture, posture, gaze), and the context of use back into the analysis of the speech stream. Interactional approaches try to figure out what goes on with phenomena like turn-taking, back-channeling, sequencing, perspective, and stance during a conversation, what interlocutors are doing with their hands and bodies and faces while they speak or listen, and how they successfully negotiate the course of the conversation and their joint attention to aspects of it and the overall usage context.
Prerequisites: LING 101 (Please contact Diane McKen for help enrolling)
Dr. Karsten Koch will be offering LING 399-A3, the topic is Pragmatics. The course will be on Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30 -1:50 in room ESB 1 33. Below is a description of the course and course outcomes.
Almost everything we say means more than the strict literal meaning of the words and sentences that we use.
Have you ever wondered how we imply additional meaning in conversation? How politicians and advertisers manipulate presupposed meaning to sell you things? How we decide what "this" or "it" refers to? How "man" in "Hey, man!" has a different meaning than in "The man opened the door"?
Pragmatics is the study of how we enrich the basic meaning of language via context. You will be introduced to basic topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, deixis, and speech acts.
You will learn useful theoretical tools for the linguistic analysis of everyday language, and how pragmatics interacts with other areas of linguistics, including syntax, phonology, and semantics
Prerequisites: LING 101 (Please contact Diane McKen for help enrolling)
Dr. Antti Arppe and Dr. Benjamin Tucker will be offering LING 399-A4, the topic is Linguistics of Tolkien. The course will be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 11:00 - 11:50 in room ASH 4-70. Below is a description of the course.
Introduction to linguistics using the languages of Tolkien's literary works as the basis for understanding core linguistic concepts and phenomena as well as learning the fundamentals of linguistic analysis, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. In addition, the course will touch upon topics particular to Tolkien's languages such as historical linguistics and language change, linguistic typology and writing systems.
No Linguistics Prerequisite required: Please contact Diane McKen for help enrolling
Please contact the professor if you would like to know more about the course content. If you have any questions about registration, please contact Diane McKen. (Undergraduate administrator)