Odsjek za anglistiku

This is an introductory course in linguistics, which combines theoretical insight with practical, problem based activities (PBL). Its aim is to make students become aware of the miracle of language, and guide them towards the different ways in whish language can be explored. More specifically, the goal of the course is to equip students with basic linguistic notions that should enable them to view and understand language as a structured whole, and its relation to human thinking. This is accomplished by providing a background in several core areas of the study of human language i.e. helping students to master the main linguistic notions relative to the origin of language, written vs. spoken language, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, first language acquisition and second language acquisition.

All the above should, in turn, prepare students for a number of future courses, and enable them to follow all other linguistic subjects and modules that they will encounter during their course of studies (e.g. semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics etc.).

Finally, the course is also intended to show students the need to study language(s) from the crosslinguistic perspective.

As part of the course students individually solve weekly PBL (problem based learning) TASKS.

How do words mean? How do we find them when we need them, and how do we interpret them when we hear them? And how do we know when to understand them literally, and when to 'shift' meaning from literal to contextually implied? Where, and what is meaning? These are just some of the questions that we will adress in this course.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the key concepts and problems in semantics and pragmatics, and enable them to deal with the problem of meaning in their own (research) work.

The course offers an introduction to the basic concepts and methods in the analysis of natural language meaning through a survey of four major current approaches and their findings: philosophical semantics, descriptive (traditional) semantics, cognitive semantics, and pragmatics. It should help students gain a better grasp of the relation between meaning and thought (concept), and ultimately help them tackle issues related to meaning both in intra- and crosslinguistic work.

This course is designed to introduce you to phonetics and phonology and the basics of the English sound system
We will cover the following topics:
- fundamentals of phonetics and phonology
- articulatory (and acoustic) phonetics
- English vowels and consonants
- phonemic and phonetic transcription
- prosodic phonology
- pronunciation varieties of English