JAPN 231
Survey of Linguistic Diversity: Meaning, Context and Communication Spring 2013
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

This course explores ways in which various types of concepts, including sensory experience, emotion and interpersonal awareness, are encoded differently across languages. The course centers around the two core areas of linguistics, semantics (study of meaning) and pragmatics (study of meaning in context and use), and discusses selected articles and book chapters, incorporating other related fields such as cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics. Other core areas, phonetics/phonology (study of speech sounds) and morphology/syntax (study of word/sentence formation), will be briefly introduced. Lectures will primarily focus on two typologically-distant languages, English and Japanese, for comparison, and some reading materials and assignments involve data from various languages. No previous knowledge of linguistics or of a particular foreign language is required.