C o u r s e O b j e c t i v e s
inguistics 105 is an introduction to the wonders of language. It is designed to raise our estimation of the mastery of language and of the only species that employs it. Linguistics 105 explores both the mysteries of language today and the question of how languages arise over the centuries. It is a course about the human mind and how the human mind acquires language, uses language, and passes it on to later generations. The course not only assists in understanding language and how language serves as a crucial divide between humans and other species, it provides an important base for learning a second language either here at Bucknell or later on in life. Most importantly, however, it allows you to peek at some of the magic being constantly performed between our ears, without our even knowing it.
LN 105 is also a good preparation for learning a new language. It provides students with an insight into their own language in comparison with other languages. The course will focus not only on languages taught at Bucknel, but will examine the grammatical categories and processes of languages from around the world. This information may be usefully applied in learning languages at Bucknell and later in life. It also serves as an introduction to the rich array of languages and language types spoken across the globe. The topics covered include: phonetics, phonology, morphology, speech production, language acquisition, historical linguistics. LN 110, offered in the spring term, will cover the linguistic revelations of social relations and attitudes found in semantics, sociolinguistics, dialects, linguistic sexism, as well as the innate and universal aspects of syntax. LN 105 may be taken independently of LN 110 and vice versa.
The course provides you with a direct experience of the phonological (sound) and morphological (affixational) phenomena of a broad range of the world's languages during the first half of the semester. This experience is then applied to understanding how humans learn and process languages. The first part of the course is based less on reading than on developing analytical skills in solving problems of linguistic sound and meaning relations. For example, what is the patterning among the different pronunciations of -ed in words like peck-ed, pegg-ed, and pett-ed? What sort of sound-meaning relations hold between words like bake, bak-er, bak-ing, bak-able, and un-bak-abil-ity. Homework during the first half of the course will include written problems designed to provide a first-hand knowledge of and experience with the intricacies of linguistic structures such as these. The general procedure is to complete 4-5 sets of about 3 problems each, after they are corrected and reviewed in class, a final set is turned in to be graded.
Once a sense of the nature of linguistic structure is acquired, the course will turn its attention to how language is acquired and processed. First, we will look at the organization of the brain and discuss how the organization of language might fit in. We will examine normal speech errors such as I am turking Talkish (instead of I am talking Turkish) and pathological speech errors caused by damage to the language areas of the brain. Next, we will apply our knowledge of linguistic structures to the acquisition of language by asking the questions: How do human beings learn language? Are human beings the only species that can learn language? What about our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees? This portion of the course will rely on readings, lectures, videos, and discussions and requires no written homework.
The course ends by raising the questions of how languages arose historically and what sort of changes do languages undergo across time. The focus of this final segment of the course is the Indo-European languages, to which English, French, Latin, German, Greek, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Spanish belong. How do we know that these languages are not only related, but descend from a single parent language? What changes has English undergone in its historical development and what changes is it currently undergoing? The grand finale of the course returns to written sleuth-work, following clues of the historical ancestry of languages by comparing words with similar sounds and meaning, such as French mere, German mutter, Spanish madre and English mother. The words mean the same thing, but is the 'm' and 'r' coincidentally identical? If not, what happened to the 't' in French? And why are all the vowels different?
