This course aims at providing an essential introduction to linguistics as a cognitive science, by making the participants familiar with the different perspectives from which linguistics can be built as a science of language: language as a cultural and historical entity, as a communication system and as a computational system characterized by the interaction of different cognitive modules. Specific attention will be paid to the relationship between syntactic structures and (phrasal) meaning, and to the relationship between meaning and the use of language.
This course consists in an introduction to the main elements of sound analysis and sound representation (phonetics and phonology), rules of word formation (morphology), sentence derivation and sentence representation (syntax), sentence meaning in isolation and in context (semantics and discourse-theory), and language use (pragmatics). The enlightened properties of human language will be discussed in a broad cognitive perspective, by focusing especially on the relationship between grammar and meaning.
Written exam
