From Language to Linguistics

Course goals

The goal of the course is to acquaint the participants with the central notions and principles of linguistics - a scientific study of human language that probes into the nature of language itself and seeks to answer the fundamental questions as to what language is and how it works. Students will learn to use the formal tools of morphological and syntactic analyses and connect these to the position of language as a cognitive ‘module’.  Under the view we will adopt, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology since it studies our ‘competence’ (knowledge of natural language) which is, in turn, an aspect of our mind.

Content

The participants will be acquainted with the leading ideas, central notions and fundamental principles of theoretical linguistics, concerned with the constructing of models of linguistic knowledge. We will particularly focus on morphology and syntax as two subfields of theoretical linguistics. The course deals with the “nature-nurture” debate, searches for explanations of linguistic universals, but it also discusses the boundaries of natural language. We will discuss how Universal Grammar operates and how natural language relates to other cognitive processes. A central role in the course will be given to getting ourselves familiarized with the core structural principles of natural language. As the title of the course indicates, our starting point will be the wonderment about the data from the participants’ native language(s), but our goal will be to analyse these data and compare them, in a systematic fashion, with data from other languages, both closely and distantly related to it.

Additional information

This course is part of the minor Linguistics.