The School of Letters & Tongues · language, literature & writing
Linguistics
What every language shares and why they differ — sounds, structure, meaning, and change, studied as a science.
A first tour of the field — phonetics to pragmatics — and the habit of describing language instead of policing it.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~24 hours
Unit I — What Language Is
Hockett's design features · Prescriptive and descriptive approaches · Language versus dialect
Unit II — Sounds and Words
The vocal tract and the IPA · Morphemes: the working parts of words · Word formation, compounding to blending
Unit III — Sentences and Meaning
Constituency: why word order is not enough · Structural and lexical ambiguity · Meaning in context
Unit IV — Language in Humans
First-language acquisition · Language and the brain · Writing systems: a technology, not language itself
How speech sounds are made, transcribed, and organized into the sound system of a language.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~22 hours
Unit I — Articulatory Phonetics
Place and manner of articulation · Voicing · Vowels and the vowel space
Unit II — The IPA in Practice
Transcribing English · Sounds English lacks · Narrow and broad transcription
Unit III — Phonology
Phonemes and allophones · Minimal pairs · Natural classes and features
Unit IV — Processes and Patterns
Assimilation, deletion, epenthesis · Syllable structure · Stress and tone
Constituents, trees, and movement — the formal machinery behind every sentence you have ever said.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~26 hours
Unit I — Constituents
Tests for constituency · Phrase structure rules · Drawing and reading trees
Unit II — The Clause and Its Arguments
Heads, complements, adjuncts · Subcategorization · Theta roles
Unit III — Movement
Questions and wh-movement · Passives · Islands: where movement fails
Unit IV — Variation and Theory
Word order across languages · Universal Grammar and its critics · Formal grammars and parsing
What words and sentences mean, and how speakers mean more than they say.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~22 hours
Unit I — Word Meaning
Sense and reference · Lexical relations, synonymy to hyponymy · Prototypes
Unit II — Sentence Meaning
Truth conditions · Entailment and presupposition · Quantifiers and scope
Unit III — Meaning in Use
Speech acts · Grice's maxims and implicature · Politeness and indirectness
Unit IV — Context and Beyond
Deixis · Metaphor as a semantic problem · Where semantics meets philosophy
Why nobody speaks a language the same way twice, and what variation reveals about communities and power.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — Variation Is the Norm
Idiolect, dialect, sociolect · The linguistic variable · Labov's department-store study
Unit II — Language and Identity
Register and style-shifting · Language and gender · Code-switching
Unit III — Attitudes and Power
Standard-language ideology · Accent discrimination · Language policy and planning
Unit IV — Change in Progress
How sound change spreads · Age grading and real change · Endangered languages and revitalization
The comparative method, sound laws, and the detective work that reconstructed languages no one wrote down.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~24 hours
Unit I — The Comparative Method
Cognates and correspondence sets · Reconstruction · The Indo-European discovery
Unit II — Sound Change
Grimm's Law · Regularity and its exceptions · Chain shifts
Unit III — Beyond Sounds
Analogy · Semantic change, bleaching to pejoration · Grammaticalization
Unit IV — Contact and Family Trees
Borrowing versus inheritance · Pidgins and creoles · The limits of reconstruction