The 'Celts' are any of those peoples of Europe who speak or spoke a Celtic language. By the Iron Age the Celtic peoples were spread across Europe and across the course of millennia have given rise to a number of European nations and cultures-including the Irish, the Welsh and the Bretons. This unit explores definitions of the Celts, examining their history and development, and provides an overview of their languages.

The Welsh language has one of the oldest literary traditions in Europe. This unit will introduce students to this culture by providing them with the basic structure and vocabulary of the language, with an emphasis on the acquisition of oral and written skills of communication through functionally oriented language activities. The language will be studied in the context of Welsh history, literature and society.

The Irish language has one of the oldest literary traditions in Europe. The language is widely used today and is the vehicle for a rich culture. In this course the Irish language will be studied in depth in the context of Irish history and culture.

An introduction to the history of Western ideas about the structure, origin and use of language, with a particular focus on theories of English grammar and on the main theoretical developments of the 20th century. Students will consider the evolution of grammatical and rhetorical thought with reference both to the inherent constraints on linguistic theorizing, and to the varying ideological currents that have shaped Western ideas on language structure and use from antiquity to the present.

Old English was the language of England from the fifth century until the twelfth. This earliest phase of the English literary tradition evolved against a background of cultural encounters: as the Anglo-Saxons encountered the culture of Rome, as they adopted and adapted the Christian religion, and as they reflected on their origins on the European continent. This unit introduces students to the language spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons, and presents the opportunity to translate and read Old English texts.

The focus of this unit of study is French language. It will familiarise you with the status and profile of the main varieties of French within and outside France as well as current issues in language policy in the French speaking world, while introducing you to key concepts such as register, linguistic variation (according to gender, age, social origin, etc.), or issues of multilingualism and diglossia. Through critical reading and practice, you will learn how to design, conduct and report research projects regarding French language.

This unit will introduce students to current debates on language and language usage in contemporary Italy, and in particular on the changing nature of the country's multilingualism under the influence of various factors. The language impact of immigration, the decline of historical minorities, the position of dialects and Italy's role in the European Union are some of the topics that will be explored.

This unit of study examines the main linguistic phenomena that occur in the contact between majority and minority languages in a context of migration, using the Italo-Australian community as a case.

This unit will apply methods of linguistic analysis to explore a number of key language strategies used in Japanese to construct speakers' social identity, and their relationships both with people they are talking to (interlocutors) and people they are talking about (referents). Students will collect and analyse authentic data in a guided research project, and will use the results of that analysis in writing a critical response to the work of other scholars in the field.

This unit explores the fundamental properties of human language, with examples from languages spoken in every part of the world. We look at the sounds of human language: how the speech organs make them, and how different they can be across languages. We gain a detailed understanding of English consonants and vowels, and we learn how to transcribe them phonetically. We investigate the ways in which sounds can convey meanings, through the formation of words and sentences in English and many other languages. We see how and why English is different from Japanese, Swahili, German, 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?

Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of human speech. Phonology is the study of the representation and organization of sound in human language. This unit introduces students to these two core fields within linguistics, while also offering a brief overview of the phonetic and phonological diversity found in the world's languages. Basic phonological patterns are explored and students are given hands on practice in analysing these patterns.

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 aims to give an overview of the languages of indigenous Australians. Of the 250 distinct Aboriginal languages spoken in 1788, most are dead or dying and just 20 languages are expected to survive another few generations. This unit of study will challenge this grim and oft-quoted statistic. We will see that new Aboriginal languages have emerged, apparently moribund languages have been gaining strength and distinctive Aboriginal ways of talking have survived. We consider why some languages have prospered while others have declined. We explore how Australian languages have responded to the challenges of non-Aboriginal settlement, in such arenas as education, land rights and health.

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.

Around the age of two when a child knows virtually nothing at all about complex systems s/he begins to acquire and use one of the most complex of all systems: language. This is done without any formal instruction or even in many cases with any real attention being paid to it. This is a remarkable feat as anyone who has tried to learn another language can attest. How the child does this is the subject matter of this course. We will consider what it is about the human child that makes language learning possible and why dogs or chimpanzees for example do not learn language. What is the role of the child's caretaker? Do parents actually teach their children or not? Why do children babble? How do they learn not to say ungrammatical things when no one ever says them or even tells them they are impossible? When do they learn different aspects of the grammar? How do they know that you can say 'I gave the book to Mary' and 'I gave Mary the book' and 'I opened the book for Mary' but not 'I opened Mary the door'? We will look at many experimental studies illustrating the child's knowledge of complex aspects of grammar. Topics covered: innateness; maturation; topics in the acquisition of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Each student will have first hand experience in studying the emergence of language.

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.

Intercultural communication is common, especially in today's globalized societies. It is challenging for people who engage in it, as well as for theories of communication in different societies. We consider approaches including conversation analysis, speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysis. In analysing samples of cross-cultural communication we attend to how social relationships are reflected in linguistic practices. We explore applied perspectives on intercultural communication in educational, courtroom and workplace interactions.

All languages can be used to build meanings of roughly equivalent complexity, but they often do this in very different ways. This core unit focuses on morphology and syntax, exploring the nature of these aspects of language, and showing how they are related to other aspects of language such as discourse and the lexicon.

Categorization is a fundamental cognitive process. Without it we would not be able to distinguish food from non-food, relate to others in meaningful ways, or find solutions to problems. This interdisciplinary course approaches categorization from different perspectives including those of psychology, linguistics, philosophy and anthropology.

Human languages show a great range of diversity in every level of structure: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and more. Yet at the same time this diversity is constrained by universal or near-universal properties. This unit examines the nature and extent of diversity in the world¿s languages, exploring how this diversity can be best described, analysed, and explained. Principles of Language Typology and techniques for discovering patterns and generalizations are introduced. Explanations for diversity and universals are considered.

'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.

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.

Language is a dynamic system, under constant pressures and continually evolving. Sounds and sound systems of human languages are incredibly diverse yet at the same time there are identifiable principles or factors that seem to constrain the diversity found in the phonetic and phonological systems of language. This unit examines sound systems in language, from a holistic point of view, looking at phonetic and phonological properties of sounds. Techniques are introduced to help analyse linguistic sound systems in terms of synchronic patterns and also their diachronic development.

This elective unit explores issues and challenges at an advanced level in the analysis of word and sentence structure, and introduces a range of formal and functional models developed for the description and analysis of complex morphological and syntactic issues.

This unit introduces students to the methods of linguistic argument through careful study of a current debate in theoretical linguistics. Students learn to identify and assess the underlying assumptions, to work out what evidence would confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses made by different parties in the debate, and to draw conclusions as to which hypotheses are more likely to be useful or correct. They also learn to situate the debate within the wider contexts of linguistic theories and language description. Students are asked to contact staff members to discuss potential topics.

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 advanced seminar aims to prepare students for independent research in linguistics through critical reading and discussion of current issues and approaches in theory, data, methodologies, and criticism in linguistics and related research domains.

Honours is an intensive year-long program of advanced study based around research. Honours is undertaken after successful completion of a Bachelor degree and where the overall mark is a minimum credit average (70%). Entry into Honours is selective and work at this level is challenging. Honours is available in most subjects areas taught in the Faculty, and which are listed under Tables A and B in the Handbook. Students will complete a thesis and coursework seminars throughout the year. For further information contact the Honours Coordinator in the department or consult the Handbook entry for the relevant subject area.

Refer to LNGS4011

Refer to LNGS4011

Refer to LNGS4011

This unit extends the theories and methods of investigating memory and attentional processes discussed in PSYC2013 to consider a number of domains of higher cognitive processing. One strand of the course will focus on the cognitive processes involved in speech perception, language comprehension, language production, and reading. The remainder of the course will deal with the cognitive processes involved in reasoning and skill acquisition. The practical program will expose students to a variety of the research methods used to investigate higher cognitive processes, develop their understanding of how these methods can be used to investigate hypotheses about mental processes and consider applications of cognitive research to real-world problems and issues.