Superlinguistics: Comics, Signs and Other Sequential Images

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

Super-linguistics is a subfield of linguistics that applies techniques used for analyzing natural language to non-linguistic materials. This course uses linguistic tools from semantics, pragmatics and syntax to study sequential images found in comics, films, and children's books. We will also study multimedia, gestures, and static images such as instruction signs, emoji, and paintings. Linguistic topics include anaphora, implicature, tense and aspect, attitudes and embedding, indirect discourse, and dynamic semantics. We introduce linguistic accounts of each of the topics and apply them to pictorial data.