Introduction to Language and Linguistics

ABOUT THE COURSE:The course tries to give an idea about the knowledge of language and different levels of linguistic analysis, keeping in mind various types of linguistic data. After attending the course, one will be able to conduct basic linguistic analysis in phonology and morphology; transcribe using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), draw basic syntax trees and do parsing. Additionally, the course gives an overview of relevant topics like language and script, linguistic areas, dialects etc.INTENDED AUDIENCE: B.Tech and masters students interested in linguistics, PhD scholars who need basic idea of linguisticsINDUSTRY SUPPORT: Companies working in computational linguistics, e.g. Google, Microsoft

Week 1: What is Knowledge of Language? What is Plato’s problem? What do we do in Linguistics?Week 2:Competence and Performance Universal Grammar, Rules of languageWeek 3:Levels of Linguistic Analysis Phonetics and Phonology: The BasicsWeek 4:International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) How do we use IPA while collecting linguistic data?Week 5:Morpheme-Morph-Allomorph Morphological Analysis: DataWeek 6:Phrase Structure Rules, Constituency Tests, Syntactic Ambiguity Tree and Linearization, different parts of a treeWeek 7:Lexical Semantics and basics of pragmaticsWeek 8:Introducing Computational LinguisticsWeek 9:Different types of language classification Linguistic area India as a Linguistic areaWeek 10:Language and scriptWeek 11:Language and dialect StandardizationWeek 12:Summing up