Introduction to Linguistic Analysis

3 credits · Undergraduate credit

Languages are rule-governed systems. The rules that interest linguists are not prescriptive ones but are rather the systematic patterns that language speakers unconsciously know as part of their linguistic competence. This course in introduces students to the theoretical principles used by linguists for rendering speakers' implicit knowledge of their language explicit. Our goal is to understand the properties shared by all languages as well as the ways in which languages can differ from each other and change, with the broader aim of understanding the formal structure of human language - how language "works".