This unit is taught over 13 weeks in a 3 hour symposium (Semester 1- Friday 1pm - 4pm: C5A 218). 

These sessions are compulsory. Before attending each class, students will be expected to have read the relevant text, and made notes about issues they wish to discuss. As indicated in the assessments explained above, one or two students will be expected to explain their ‘sense’ of the reading, its problems and importance. Students will be asked to nominate a topic for which they can lead off ‘the tutorial debate’.  

The textbook is:

Allan, Keith (2010: 2nd (expanded) Ed.) The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics: London; Oakville: Equinox

A number of volumes now give useful, brief introductions to important linguists and language philosophers and anthropologists. For example, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century, Joseph, J.E.; Love, N.; and Taylor, T.J.; Routledge History of Linguistic Thought Series: London & New York. The strength of this work is that there are brief selections from each of the linguists discussed. Other references with very useful, but very brief, accounts of the careers of relevant scholars are: Thomas, M. (2011) Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics London New York: Routledge; and Chapman, S. and Routledge, C. (2005) Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press.

Each lecture may involve an additional text - at the specific recommendation of the lecturers for that topic. The convenor will circulate additional material prior to the seminar. While other texts need to be cited to discuss the various topics, the Allan text (or an indicated alternative) is the required reading.

Here's the outline of weeks for LING701 for 2016:

Week 1: Pre-Modern Approaches to Language

Fri. 4th March

What are the linguistic legacies of Greece and Rome? Is there an ambivalence in the continued influence of Greek and Latin grammars and philology? Why did Socrates & Plato vehemently oppose the Sophists of Athens? We will consider Aristotle and the codification of Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic; the pursuit of a ‘lingua mentalis’ from mediaeval to early modern scholarship; the widening of linguistic enquiry (both William and Alexander von Humboldt in the C19^th ); developments of modern logic; the continuing debate between persuasion & truth; investigating natural languages as linguistic metalanguages: the problems of using English as a metalanguage; the limitations of Western Classical categories of grammar and rhetoric; the pedagogical fate of the "tradition" (viz. Dickens and "Mr. Gradgrind").

Week 2: Theories of Language Change and Language Relationships

Fri. 11th March

This week begins from the notion of a “language family”. We will consider the impact of the study of Sanskrit on Europeans, the idea of Proto-Indo-European and the understanding of language change and the idea of language laws. We also discuss the Neogrammarians and the comparative method, the relationship between language and the growing interest in evolutionary theories in the C18th (and Darwin’s later use of language change to illustrate “descent with modification” and the origin of species); the counter pressures for stability and “rules” in society and in language. This period of linguistics also sees the rise of popular grammars and reference guides to language, including dictionaries.

Week 3: Approaches to Interaction: Philosophy and Ethnomethodology

Fri. 18th March

This week we consider the split in the early C20th between the development of logic (eg. Russell and the early Wittgenstein) and sociological approaches to interaction and language (eg. Durkheim; Saussure). We cover the influence of Logical Positivists in Europe, and the development of Pragmatism with Peirce and James in America; studies of interaction since WWII; and the new “pragmatics” – eg. speech acts and conversational analysis (CA), and consider how it builds on the past, and how these ideas have been applied in research projects more recently. We consider Grice’s switch from logic to the logic of conversations; the status of “linguistic meanings” and the characterization of semantics during the syntactic preoccupations of 1965 to the 1985; and the explosion of discourses around “Pragmatics”, natural language semantics, and anthropological linguistics.

Week 4:

Fri. 25th March: Easter Friday Holiday: NO CLASS         

Week 5: Grammar, Syntax, and the Realization of Meanings

Fri: 1st April: 

With the passing of the 19^th century, there was a development of descriptions of languages outside of classical and historical enquiries. A number of scholars are relevant here. We discuss Jespersen’s 4 volume treatment of English; Sapir’s writings “On Language” and the reconciliation of linguistic “drift” with the experience of individual speakers; Russian linguistics and the debate concerning ergative patterning in languages of the Caucasus; Firth and the description of languages at the School of Oriental and African Languages in London; the functionalism of the Prague School; Halliday and the emphasis on the description of spoken Chinese. We consider developments in representing functional theories of language; the relations between anthropology and linguistics; recent developments among functional theories of grammar, including construction grammar and historical perspectives reintroduced through corpus studies and other techniques; and applications of functional theories to real world problems, from AI to professional discourses and literature.

Week 6: Theories of Syntax: the Generative Tradition

Fri. 8th  April

This week we review Bloomfield’s alignment of linguistics with Behaviourist psychology in the second edition of Language (1933). We will look into the claims of B.F. Skinner in his Verbal Behaviour (1959); Chomsky’s critique of Skinner; and Chomsky’s teachers – Harris and Goodman. We review the development of Chomsky’s approach in “Syntactic Structures”(1957); the “Aspects…” model (1965): deep structure, phrase structure and formalization – the goals of transformational generative grammar; language as a sub-branch of “cognitive psychology”; the split c.1968 with “notational variants” (debate over deep structure: syntactic or semantic); innateness and “the poverty of the stimulus” in relation to language acquisition; the debates with Searle and speech act theory (“Reflections…”1975). We consider the shifts in the model 1975 to 1995, via “Language and Thought” (1993), and the development of “Minimalism” (1995). We review “recursion” and “merge” in Chomsky’s current thinking (Chomsky and McGilvray 2010); evolutionary theory and Chomsky (e.g.“Why only Us”, Berwick and Chomsky 2015). We also discuss Chomsky’s linguistics and his political writings: human nature and authoritarian governments.

Week 7: Theories of Sound Structure I

Fri. 29th April

This week we consider the isolation of basic units in linguistic sciences. Our topics include the notion of a basic unit of sound: the phoneme; Henry Sweet (‘Professor Higgins” in Shaw’s play: “Pygmalion”) and phonetics in Britain; De Courtenay (1845-1929), Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), and Jakobson (1896-1982) in Russia; the Prague school in the development of phonology; the reality of the phoneme, and some dissenting voices; Firth and prosodic phonology: pattern and process; the emergence of a generative approach to phonology (Chomsky and Halle 1968); work on intonation; variation among languages: how variation is represented and understood; the studies of the Australian accent.

Week 8: Genetic Relationships between Languages: Typological Findings and Debating Language Universals

Fri. 6th May:

World Languages “in the round” – by features and by maps. This week we debate the findings and the reasons for, and the methods of, field work. We look at language families – the global view. Are there language universals emerging from typological evidence? We start with the early work of Greenberg, and consider Comrie and his relative clause hierarchy. We consider the topic from the perspective of Australian languages, including the scholarship of A. Capell, R.M.W. Dixon, C.L.Yallop and K. Hale’s generative account of Walpiri. We look at the longstanding debates about thought and language: Whorf (Hopi); Evans and Levinson (various languages); Everett (Pirahã). We also touch on the issues arising from language contacts, and the view from translation studies.

Week 9: Text and Meaning

Fri. 13th May:

This discussion sets out from questions about units of meaning and proceeds to how these are realized. The initial unit is “the text”, and its place in language studies and linguistics is reviewed. Specialists in classics, stylistics, narratology, and semiotics have all analysed “texts” (alongside any particular focus on details of sentence or word). Such analyses have long included structural analysis (e.g. Propp 1928; Barthes 1975). Fieldwork on natural languages has necessarily focussed on text as a higher unit of linguistic analysi (e.g. Pike 1967; Becker 1979). Over the last 60 years, however, there has been a formalisation of ‘Textlinguistics’, now with greater focus on explicit realizations between meanings and wordings. Such formalisations has offered new tools for extracting evidence from text patterns – evidence applied in a wide range of public domains. We consider some of the key concepts in text linguistics, including cohesion and coherence, context, register, rhetorical structure, and genre (e.g. Halliday and Hasan 1976, 1985).

Week 10: Language, Culture, and Sociolinguistics in Society

Fri. 20th May:

This session addresses the two key questions of sociolinguistics and traces their historical development:

• How do we organize our social lives in and through language?
• How does language serve to produce and reproduce the social order?

The emergence of sociolinguistics with 19th century  dialectology (Jules Gilliéron, Georg Wenker) to 20^th century variationist sociolinguistics (Bill Labov, Peter Trudgill). The discussion will focus on the critical apparatus of language sociology in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Background might also include 20th century views of culture in linguistics (eg. Sapir); the role of variation in linguistics and in other sciences (eg. Lewontin in genetics/epigenetics).

Week 11: Theories of Language Development and of Language Acquisition

Fri. 27th May:

How do children develop language? This week we consider the current broad spectrum of ideas about evolution and the development of language in children. We review both nativist accounts (eg. Chomsky and Pinker on language acquisition) and functionalist traditions (eg. Trevarthen; Halliday; and Bruner). We consider evidence from neuroscience, including the general versus narrow conceptions of the “language ready” brain. We look at language development 0-2yrs; 3-6; and over a life span; at language “disruptions” in individuals as evidence about language development/acquisition; at current attitudes to genetic and epigenetic factors in human growth.

Week 12: Theories of Sound Structure 2

Fri. 3 June

The topic this week is current methods for achieving evidence in phonetics and phonology. We consider the development and extension of instrumentation in the analysis and representation (eg. imaging) of speech processing; the theoretical implications of more finely grained evidence; and the potential for new applications.

Week 13: Linguistic Theories, Evidence and Falsifiability

Fri. 10th June:

Do linguists as scientists need to consider the “philosophy of science”? How should we navigate between reliable scientific methods and the need to think and research genuinely innovative possibilities? What constitutes a tractable scientific research topic in language studies? What constitutes an ‘appropriate’ scale for research at Masters and/or Doctoral levels.

The textbook is:

Allan, Keith (2010: 2nd (expanded) Ed.) The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics: London; Oakville: Equinox

A number of volumes now give useful, brief introductions to important linguists and language philosophers and anthropologists. For example, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century, Joseph, J.E.; Love, N.; and Taylor, T.J.; Routledge History of Linguistic Thought Series: London & New York. The strength of this work is that there are brief selections from each of the linguists discussed. Other references with very useful, but very brief, accounts of the careers of relevant scholars are: Thomas, M. (2011) Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics London New York: Routledge; and Chapman, S. and Routledge, C. (2005) Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press.

Each lecture may involve an additional text - at the specific recommendation of the lecturers for that topic. The convenor will circulate additional material prior to the seminar. While other texts need to be cited to discuss the various topics, the Allan text (or an indicated alternative) is the required reading.