Introduction to Linguistics
Learn the general properties that all languages in the entire world have.
Description
In this course, we look at the five major pillars of analytic linguistics. These five pillars tell us about the general properties of language and help us talk about the similarities and differences in languages.
The primary focus of the course will be teaching you the tools in our language toolbox using English. However, we will also look at different languages, such as Japanese, Marshalese, Khmer, Tagalog, and a few others.
The course primarily consists of videos, but I've included a couple practice exams that you can use to demonstrate your mastery of the course.
Even if you're not interested in demonstrating mastery, the content provided is incredibly interesting for those who wish to learn languages in the future. The tools you learn here will help you understand that not all languages have the same sets of rules and features, and that you can use that knowledge to help you learn other languages even faster! We discuss how you make sounds, how you put sounds together, word orders, conjugation, and more!
What You Will Learn!
- Understand the fundamentals of language
- Understand sentence structure and word order of various languages.
- Classify words into nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, quantifiers, and adverbs.
- Draw syntactic trees for simple sentences.
- Understand the difference between entailment, implicature, presupposition, and contradiction.
- Understand Gricean Maxims and when they are utilized or broken in conversation.
- Identify the thematic role of words in a sentence.
- Understand what affixes do and how they can change the meaning of words.
- Identify morphological processes in languages across the world.
- Understand the properties of vowels and consonants.
- Read and write the International Phonetic Alphabet.
- Understand how sounds interact with each other.
- Use the features of sounds to create rules about how sounds change in different environments.
- Attain the toolbox required to learn languages a little bit easier.
Who Should Attend!
- This course is meant for anyone with an interest in language, languages, or the general properties of language. This is not a course that will teach you languages, however, you will learn bits and pieces of other languages through examples of the various processes we discuss in the course.