Through the Looking-Glass of Language: a Comparative-Linguistic Journey

Course goals

At the end of the course, students are able to describe and analyze the language of their study from a cross-linguistic perspective. They are able to identify similarities and differences between languages, based on data (i) from language corpora (e.g. those used in the Crossing Borders courses earlier in the track), (ii) (offline and online) grammar resources, and (iii) their own research (e.g. data collection based on interviews with fellow students having another language background). Besides acquiring skills in the cross-linguistic study of Germanic and Romance languages, students will get acquainted with theories of linguistic variation in different areas of grammar. They will gain expertise in the application of these theories to cross-linguistic data sets, including data sets from second language learners. By taking a comparative-linguistic perspective, students practice their role as a language and linguistic expert. This expertise will be useful in various institutional and professional contexts including linguistic diagnosis/development, education, translation.

 

Content

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, young Alice magically steps through a large mirror and enters an unfamiliar world, more specifically a world in which, just like a reflection, everything is reversed: running helps you remain stationary, and walking away from something brings you towards it. This course takes students through the looking glass of language by taking a cross-linguistic perspective on Germanic languages (Dutch, German), on the one hand, and Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish), on the other. Just like Alice, students of these languages will discover that what is “normal” in the grammar of their language of study (e.g. Spanish) may be unusual or different in the grammar of this other linguistic world (e.g. Dutch).
To give some examples:
(i) Germanic and Romance languages use different strategies to express nominal constructions that do not contain a lexical noun (referred to as N-ellipsis), as illustrated in the following examples: English: John saw a red car and a green one; Dutch: Jan zag een rode auto en een groene, Spanish: Juan vio un coche rojo y uno verde.
(ii) Languages make use of different linguistic means to emphasize that something is true. If, for instance, one speaker claims that Lucy didn’t go to the movies yesterday, she can correct him/her by using, among other things, a particle (Dutch wel: Ik ben wel naar de film geweest gisteravond / French bien: Je suis bien allé au cinema hier soir) or intonation (German: Ich BIN gestern im Kino gewesen).
(iii) Romance languages establish a distinction between perfective and imperfective past tenses (Spanish leyó/leía; French lut/lisait that is missing in Germanic languages (German/Dutch las); all languages under consideration have a perfect construction (German hat gelesen, Italian ho letto), but the perfect displays cross-linguistic variation both across and within Germanic and Romance languages.
By learning to take a comparative-linguistic perspective on language, students discover the ways in which languages can be different (diversity), as well as the ways in which languages are similar (uniformity).
There are many linguistic phenomena that lend themselves to a comparative linguistic investigation. Empirical and theoretical depth will be created by organizing the course each year around two out of the three topics listed under (i-iii). Each topic will start from empirical data (in the study language and in a comparative perspective), develop a linguistic analysis of the data, and situate them in the context of second language learning.
 

Additional information

Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final and may still be modified until the 3rd Wednesday in September. 

This is the third course of the specialisation 'Crossing Borders'. 

Please note this course is only open to students from BA German, French, Italian, Dutch and Spanish Language and Culture.