Aims

To establish a basic understanding of language structure with respect to developing the skills necessary for examining and describing linguistic data. This module will heighten metalinguistic awareness in a systematic way that will inform and enhance the sensitivity, accuracy, and clarity of the student's knowledge of language structure, including English. There will also be lectures relating these strucural issues to questions of wider interest (see below).

Outline Of Syllabus

Introduction to Language Structure

The core of the module consists of the foundations for the study of language, sentence structure and language sounds & systems. The sentence structure component in the module includes English sentence structure, involving syntactic structure, constituency, function, and categories, modification, and complementation. The language sounds component examines the representation of speech sounds and articulatory classification, along with the description of consonants and vowels and the structure of the syllable. The fundamental distinction between phonetics and phonology and the distribution of speech sounds will also be introduced.

Throughout the module these structural aspects will be related to wider questions such as: how do children acquire language? what’s the relationship between language and literacy? how can people with different dialects still understand each other? what’s wrong with the English spelling system? how can syntactic structure explain ambiguous sentences? what causes a foreign accent?

Taken as a whole, this module will lay the foundations not only for the linguistic structures to be studied but also for the kinds of questions an understanding of language structures can help to address.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures present subject materials to students, reinforcing the readings they are expected to have done. The purpose of the Small Group Work is to back up, (by means of summary, elucidation, and illustration) the concepts and analyses presented in the module text. Small group work calls for the application of concepts outlined in reading and lectures to the analysis of specific examples.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

Students will complete a set of exercises for both the syntax and phonetics/phonology components of the course. The formative feedback they receive will help prepare them for their final written assessment which will feature tasks of a similar nature.