UE Language sciences

General content

Introduction to the areas of phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics (internal language) and a brief overview of “external” language (linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics)

Knowledge

Difference between grammar, linguistics and language sciences

Prescriptive vs. descriptive approach, standard vs. non-standard

Language and speech according to Saussure

Human language and animal language

Natural language vs. artificial language

Speaking and writing

Language families

The double articulation of language, morphemes and phonemes, the notion of minimal pair

Sign and referent

Paradigmatic and syntagmatic approaches

Indices, signals, symbols, icons and signs

Semantic relationships: hyponymy, hypernymy, synonymy and opposite

Semic analysis

Distributional analysis

Immediate constituent analysis

A brief overview of the purposes of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology: Practices, representations, language ideologies, critical approaches

The naturalist approaches: neurolinguistics, linguistic genetics, cognitive linguistics

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Introduction to general morphology in a descriptive, typological and empirical approach.

- Splitting methods

- Morphological operations (affixation, reduplication, alternation)

- Concatenative and non-concatenative languages (prototypes: Arabic, Hebrew)

- The two Comrie indices (Synthesis-isolation and fusion-agglutination)

- Introduction to the morphology-phonology interface: some basics on the morphemic borders, allomorphs and suprasegmental phenomena considered from a morphological point of view.

+ 1 observation session of two canonical extremes: Sinitic type isolation (Mandarin) and Northern native American type polysynthesis (inuktitut)

+ 1 cross-disciplinary session with the deafness specialists on morphological operations in sign languages.

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Visit the full page about this course

Visit the full page about this course