This unit is a comparative look at the general structure of human language. It looks at the sounds of human language: how the speech organs make them and their variety, in particular, a detailed description of English consonants and vowels and how to transcribe them. It investigates what is a possible word in English and other languages. It looks at the way speakers put words together to form sentences and how and why is English different from Japanese or even Irish.

This unit introduces the study of the interrelationship between language and society. It is concerned with phenomena of language change and how that leads to varieties in a language. How are these varieties linked to social differences? What distinguishes male speech from female speech or what are the linguistic styles of different social classes or ethnic groups? What is slang, or jargon, and what distinguishes a casual conversation from an interview?

Syntax deals with how we combine words into phrases, clauses and sentences and how we understand these combinations. Syntax is almost purely internal to language and plays a major role in organising the language system. We look at syntactic concepts in English, languages of Europe and Asia, and those of small traditional communities around the world. Using a problem solving approach, we develop explicit models to describe syntactic phenomena that allow generalisations leading to testable predictions about possible structures.

This unit takes a functional view of grammar, considering the ways in which English is organised to build up our picture of reality, to enable us to interact in conversation and to make our contribution coherent and relevant. It is designed to give students analysis skills in the analysis of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning in the clause, the nature of inter-clausal relations, and the structure of nominal, verbal and adverbial groups and prepositional phrases.

This unit of study introduces students to the many uses of computers in the humanities with specific reference to linguistics: computer lexicography; building and searching text corpora, examining speech signals, collocations, style, authorship, discourse structure and syntactic constructions. Accessing information on languages and linguistics through library catalogues, electronic mailing lists, FTP sites and the World Wide Web. Other linguistics units (like phonetics, field methods, historical linguistics and semantics) will benefit from some basic knowledge of the use of computers.

We will discuss current findings in the field of psycholinguistics. How is language represented and processed or computed by the brain. We will look at experimental work considering the methods and results in an effort to understand the apparent ease with which language is used in everyday life as well as considering the implications of psycholinguistic research for linguistic theory. Topics discussed: language and the brain, speech perception, the mental lexicon and lexical retrieval, sentence and discourse comprehension, language production, language and cognition, nativism.

In today's globalized and multicultural societies, intercultural communication is common. It challenges people who engage in it, and theories of communication in different societies (i.e. cross-cultural communication). We consider approaches including conversation analysis, speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, and discourse analysis. In analysing samples of cross-cultural communication we attend to how social relationships between participants are reflected in their linguistic practices. We explore applied perspectives on intercultural communication in educational, courtroom and workplace interactions.

This unit will provide a foundation in the principles and methods of linguistic argumentation particularly with respect to phonological analysis and the interaction of phonetics and phonology. Topics include: basic phonological analysis; distinctive features, underlying representations, abstractness, rules and constraints, the role and function of prosodic structure: the prosodic hierarchy syllables, tone and stress, markedness.

Semantics deals with the meaning of words, phrases, sentences and texts, and the relations between those meanings. Pragmatics deals with how speakers use context and shared information to convey information additional to the semantic content of what they say, and with how hearers make inferences on the basis of this information. Our goal is to explore the diversity of ways in which meaning can be expressed linguistically in different languages, as well as of what constitutes evidence for meaning.

A language other than English is chosen for analysis (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and discourse), and for description of the ways it is used (ethnography of speaking including speech acts, speech events, registers and genres). It is examined in its areal, genetic, historical, social and typological context. We also examine sources of data and their reliability, and the way findings are presented (reference and teaching grammars and linguistic papers).

'Language looks different when you look at a lot of it at once'. This unit of study introduces you to the use of computer software to look at a lot of language at once: Do we refer to 'men' and 'women' equally often? What are the five most frequent words in the English language? What is the difference between 'pure' and 'sheer'? How does television dialogue differ from real-world dialogue? And how does a computer help us to answer these and similar questions?

Discourse analysis is concerned with analysing how people create meaning(s) in a given social context. In this unit students will learn to apply linguistic methods to the analysis of discourse. 'Discourse' includes both spoken and written language as well as images. Students will learn to apply a range of advanced linguistic methods to explore different discourse varieties and to study their organisation above the sentence level. A particular focus will be on the kinds of insights provided by different analytical techniques.

'Sexy, healthy and 100% Australian-owned!' This unit examines linguistic approaches to media discourse. The language of news texts and television series will form a special focus of the unit, along with how images are used to construe meaning. We will explore general aspects of media institutions (news and television), the ways in which social identities are constructed in the media, differences between the language of various types of media texts, the rhetoric of persuasion and the discourses of popular culture.

The unit explores expressions of social identities and relationships through language, including the connection between social groups (e.g. gender, ethnicity, age) and language use. It familiarises students with theories that explore relationships between language and identity construction/perception. The unit also equips the students with the necessary tools to critically engage with and analyse the issues of language and identity in various contexts.

This seminar aims to prepare students for research in linguistics through critical reading and discussion of current issues and approaches in research and criticism, focussing on a particular subfield of linguistics.

The Honours program in Linguistics consists of:
1) a thesis written under the supervision of one or more members of academic staff, which may include members of staff from other departments for students undertaking joint honours.
2) two (or three) seminars that meet weekly for two hours for one semester.
3) an unassessed support seminar that meets weekly for one hour for one semester
If you chose the two seminar option you write a thesis of 18000-20000 words. The thesis is worth 50% of the final Honours mark in this option.
If you chose the three seminars option you will write a shorter thesis of 12000-15000 words. The thesis is worth 40% of the final Honours mark in this option.

Students considering further academic work in the field should choose the longer thesis.
Each seminar requires 6000-8000 words of written work or its equivalent.

Refer to LNGS4011

Refer to LNGS4011

Refer to LNGS4011