Practical Linguistics Investigating language as it is today in Britain and across Europe

The Course Where we are Pure vs. Applied Linguistics Investigative skills Aspects of contemporary linguistics The studies

Where we are Introduction to linguistics: language, linguistics, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, the English language, comparative historical linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, language acquisition Script decipherment, cultural linguistics and rongorongo

Pure vs. Applied Linguistics Applied linguistics will provide the fields of interest and will affect the methodology used Pure linguistics will enable us to break down language into varieties and variables for analysis

Investigative Skills The Observer’s Paradox (Labov)

Aspects of Contemporary Linguistics What is the origin of language? Classifying languages and the problem of language isolates How can infants learn a language? The problem of pronouns in machine translation The treatment of language by people with aphasia Developing dictionaries and thesauruses for artificial intelligence Ecolinguistics Documenting the 4 endangered indigenous languages of Central Maluku (Indonesia) Acquiring literacy in English

The Studies There are numerous studies you will be able to choose from to undertake this year. Here are the fields available: 1) Teenspeak in the playground 2) A comparison of some Indo-European languages 3) Semantic shifts in contemporary English: e.g. ‘gay – gay – gay’ 4) The manipulation of language by politicians 5) Comparing politeness formulae across European standard language communities 6) How minority languages survive (e.g. Welsh) 7) How to advertise to children 8) Examples of ingrouping and outgrouping 9) Language and silence used as discourse weapons 10) Text messaging and the future of friendship building and maintaining

Planning an investigation CHOOSE A TOPIC GATHER DATA SCRUTINISE THE DATA ORGANISE THE DATA CHOOSE A METHOD OF ANALYSIS DO FOLLOW-UP RESEARCH CARRY OUT ANALYSIS DRAW CONCLUSIONS VALIDATE THE RESULTS WRITE UP THE INVESTIGATION