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Introduction to Linguistics

ENG 250Course Overview

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Phonetics and phonology

• Articulation of language sounds (consonants and vowels)• Place of articulation (body organs involved in producing a sound)

[where?]• Manner of articulation (how?)• Phonology (patterns of sounds); e.g.• Phoneme, phone, allophones /t/ e.g. aspiration; • Assimilation

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Word-formation and morphology

• coinage, borrowing, compounding and blending• Morphology: the study of morphemes; suffixes and prefixes

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syntax

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Semantics

• Meaning of words, phrases and sentences.

• Syntax is ok but semantics?the hamburger ate the boy

Lexico-grammar / systemic functional linguistics

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Pragmatics and discourse analysis

• Meaning beyond the clause/sentence.• Cohesion and coherence• Conjunction (e.g. and, but, however, first, second…)• Identification and reference (e.g. pronouns)• Lexical cohesion (e.g. repetition, synonymy, hyponymy)

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Neurolinguistics

• In what part of the brain speech is processed?• What area of the brain is responsible for the articulation of speech

sounds? Different areas for syntax and semantics?• Broca’s area -> speech production ?• Wernicke’s area -> speech comprehension?

• How can we answer the previous questions? Methodology?

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Computational linguistics

• How human language can be processed by machines?• Machine translation? Still low accuracy.• Machine understanding language• Speech-to-text (you talk, computer writes)• Automatic syntactic analysis (automatic tree diagrams, e.g. Stanford

NLP software)• Automatic cohesion analysis

Weekly quizzes and readings

www.bandaraa.com

[slides, readings, and other info]To do quizzes, you’ll need to create a free QuizEgg account (go to https://quizegg.com and sign up, plz use your full name; no double accounts).

Questions relevant to course -> in blogOther questions , you can email me at bandarhm@hotmail.comOffice Hours Sun 2:30 – 3:30 Wed 1:30 – 2:30

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Example 1

Sam teaches English grammar.

Sam is a math teacher in my high school.

Sam is a math teacher in my high school. Sam teaches English grammar.

Sam is a math teacher in my high school. Sam teaches calculus. [class-member relationship]

Sam is a math teacher in my high school. Sam also teaches English grammar. [conjunction: addition]