Science & Nature
Linguistics From Sounds, Morphemes, & Syntax to Brains, Context and Conversation
Ongoing course for major topics in field of human language study
13-18
year old learners
8th-11th
US Grade Level
1-12
learners per class
$20
Charged weekly
Meets 1x per week
Runs week after week
45 minutes per class
Cancel anytime
Available times
Pacific
Description
Class Experience
This ongoing course in linguistics will begin each session with a learning objective, short presentation, and guided and independent work on a linguistic concept from areas such as articulatory phonetics, phonological processes in human language, syllable structure and phonotactic constraints, the internal structure of words, word-formation processes, morphological analysis of various languages, phrase structure rules, word order patterns cross-linguistically, theories of the origin of...
This class is taught in English.
Each session will have a specific learning goal and sub-objectives, and will be different each time. The learning goals include but are not limited to the following: Students can describe some ways languages can differ in terms of grammar and vocabulary Students can explain the importance of linguistic fieldwork Students can detail the role of informants in doing fieldwork Students can explain some of the techniques of fieldwork methodology Students can understand the articulatory phonetics approach to studying the sounds of language Students are familiar with, and can utilize, phonetic transcription Students understand the concept of the phoneme Students have knowledge of the phonemes of English Students are able to recognize prosodic features, and understand their role in speech Students can describe the importance of linguistic formalism for studying culture and society Students can define morphemes, and explain the different kinds Students have facility in approaching basic problems in morphology and syntax Students can explain how and when writing developed in different parts of the world Students can describe various strategies people have used to put speech down on paper (or other medium) Students can clarify how alphabets and syllabaries differ Students can discuss how extra "nonverbal" features contribute to communication Students can observe how different cultures/languages think about space, posture, and gestures Students can argue that deaf sign languages are as "real" as a spoken language Students can name and describe some of the groundbreaking ape-language experiments Students can list and define the design features of language Students can explain when a generalized communication system can become a language Students are familiar with the causes of language death, and some of the ways it might be ameliorated Students can name and describe three theories of language acquisition Students can describe the basic neurological structures of the brain that relate to language Students can clarify the different ways multilingualism is used Students can explain and give examples of code-switching Students can explain and give examples of diglossia Students can explain the various ways languages are classified Students can name some of the features of language typology Students can describe some of the regularities of sound changes Students can describe some of the processes of vocabulary change Students are able to do reconstructions of some protolanguage forms Students can explain the different criteria used to define dialects (varieties) Students can explain the differences between dialect and style Students can provide examples of language contact Students can discern the differences between pidgins and creoles Students appreciate the variety and distribution of the world's languages, and their numbers Students can define what a speech community is Students can apply the checklist theory of semantics Students can apply the prototype theory of semantics Students can explain the notions behind concepts, words, and categories Students understand that meaning emerges from conversation Students can describe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its components, linguistic determinism, and linguistic relativity Students can describe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its components, linguistic determinism, and linguistic relativity Students can describe how current digital communication and language affect one another Students can apply Grice's Maxims of conversation Students can identify speech acts from naturally occurring data Students can describe the structure of a speech act Students can explain the differences between positive and negative politeness strategies in interaction
Content expertise: PhD in Linguistics Expertise working with high school students: I have been teaching an introductory 8-meeting course in Linguistics on Outschool successfully for 2 years. I have also taught at the community college level in which many of my students are high schoolers. Many students are drawn to the course content because they like the idea of inventing artificial languages for TV, film, and literature, and I capitalize on this interest to orient them to why it's important to understand the structure of human language.
There will be no homework.
1 file available upon enrollmentHandouts for the sessions will be provided. I recommend that students have a notebook and pen/pencil even if they tend to take notes or work in digital spaces.
In addition to the Outschool classroom, this class uses:
Informal, in-class feedback will be provided, but no formal assessments will be used.
45 minutes per week in class, and maybe some time outside of class.
We will refer to the International Phonetic Association's consonants and vowels of human language, the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, and we will make use of an online keyboard for phonetic transcription (https://ipa.typeit.org/full/).