Course Descriptions

Linguistics is the study of human language and ultimately the human mind. Linguistics 100 is designed to introduce the field of linguistics and the principles that are involved in the description and analysis of language. Students will develop an understanding of the core areas of linguistics - morphology (the study of words and their internal structure), phonetics (the description of how sounds are produced), phonology (the study of sound systems), and syntax (the study of phrases and sentences) - by looking at data from various languages around the world. Special attention will be given to the language backgrounds represented by students in the class, so that we can appreciate both the diversity of language and the principles that are shared by all languages.

This course explores the relationship of language to other systems - social, biological and cognitive. It explores the relationship between language and social systems (socio-linguistics), language change (historical linguistics), first and second language acquisition, language meaning and use (semantics and pragmatics), language typology and the nature of writing systems.

This course is an introduction to articulatory phonetics, a method of describing speech sounds on the basis of how they are produced or articulated. While there will be weekly assigned readings, the focus of the course will be on the development of practical skills in the transcription of English speech sounds. In addition to the reading and transcription drills, the course will also focus on the sound systems of the second languages that members of the class are currently studying.

This course is an introduction to phonology, the study of sound systems. It will focus on two topics, the description and analysis of phonological data and secondly how this analysis is formalized in order to capture generalizations about the sound systems of the languages of the world.

This course is an introduction to the theory of syntactic analysis. It is framed within the Principles and Parameters theory of syntax. Students will learn how to represent a range of structures in tree diagrams and examine the kinds of predictions that these representations make.

This course is an introduction to the origin and structure of English words: the study of etymology. Through an analysis of English vocabulary, we will learn about the history of the English language as well as learn how linguistic analysis works. Students will learn how to distinguish native words from borrowed words, and with borrowed words, learn to recognize the Latin, Greek and French origins of English words.

This course explores the relationship of language to other systems and will focus on the First Nations Languages of B.C. In particular it will explore the relationship between language, culture and social systems within the Salish (Coastal and Interior) language family. An important aspect of the course is to gain an understanding of language and culture from a First Nations perspective. Language endangerment, language policy, and efforts to retain or revive languages will also be discussed.

This course explores the diversity of indigenous languages around the world in the context of language endangerment. We will ask "what is lost if a language disappears?" We will look at the rich cultural diversity and challenges of Aboriginal Australian, Native American, Pacific and Celtic languages through such topics as language attitudes, language dominance, cross-cultural communications in the sharing of information, respect systems, pidgins and creoles, and human categorization systems.