Week

Topic

Lecture topic

1

MODULE 1:

Signs and social networks

Starting with signs in writing systems

Speech is difficult to study since it comes to us and goes in the moment; but writing systems offer us a static start – we can look at words and examine the basis of writing. Early writing systems, and many contemporary schemes are based on the ‘syllable’ – a chunk of combined sounds. An alphabet appears to be based on single sounds, and this singularity produces the smaller set of symbols of the Greek, Latin, English system that we use. Japanese has 2 syllabic scripts and an additional use of Chinese characters, which can be called upon for their value as sounds or as meanings. Chinese characters are neither iconic (pictures) or syllabic. How does all this variety work out in a wider world of global communication? How do writing systems affect literacy? What about printing and computers? Why is writing an art form in some cultures? Why is the spelling of many words unlike their actual sound? What, then, is punctuation? These basic beginnings allow us to reflect on what counts as a linguistic sign.

2

How do you mean? Signs and linguistic sign systems

If you think you know what a sign is, think again. While we are sensitive to meanings, humans generally show a poor sense of how their meanings come about. Even linguists trade in simplifications in order to avoid the paradoxical nature of our first steps in linguistics. But the complexity of sign behaviour – when we confront that complexity– becomes a source of wonder, and a new way of seeing our society and its interaction with our brains. When you make a mistake in ‘reading’ the world about you, then you are likely to be amidst a sign system that you have misinterpreted. But a linguistic sign is not simply a piece of sound aligned to a human meaning! Signs are social and psychological; psychological and social. How does this 2 way relationship come about? And how can we put our knowledge about sign systems to work as we look around us at society, at literature, at film, and in the propaganda and advertising that sweep around us with their dazzling claim on our attention and our beliefs? This lecture opens up the fields of linguistics and of semiotics (the general study of systems of signs). 

3

Social networks and social networking

The familiar notion of a social network has a history going back to the study of families, businesses, accents and dialects; and social class. All of these were studied before our use of social networks as connections through the internet and phone systems. While we generate networks of connections by living, we ask how can such networks be put to practical use – not for surveillance, but  in understanding social conditions and  social change; the dynamics of hospitals and urban systems; and in the ways we might better manage complexity of economies and cities.

4

MODULE 2: 

Linguistics in the era of big data

Linguistics in the era of big data 

We live in an era of ‘big data’. More and more scientists and engineers are involved with compiling and analysing big bodies of data, to help communities understand themselves better and to plan for the future. What does ‘big data’ mean in linguistics? This lecture introduces the idea of ‘corpora’, bodies of language data used for scholarly research as well as in many fields of practical application. We will look at the google books corpus, the largest ever corpus of English language data, and consider some technology for analysing texts as well as for visualizing patterns in text, including word clouds, word trees, and the distribution of words across a text.

5

Using technology for corpus studies 

In this lecture, we introduce you to some handy technology which automates the study of some kinds of lexical patterns in big data sets. Make sure you bring your laptop or an ipad to the lecture this week. We will step through how to use a concordance programme, and how to use Voyant Tools ( http://voyant-tools.org/). We will provide some interesting text data for you to start your own explorations.

6

What kinds of questions can you ask of a corpus? 

In this lecture, we introduce key notions for shaping and defining a corpus. The ways in which we form a body of texts shapes the kinds of questions we can ask. We discuss the importance of corpora in creating an empirical foundation for linguistics. We explore some important findings from corpus linguistics, and their cultural significance. We also discuss the limitations of automated text analysis.

7

MODULE 3: 

A World of Language Variation

Language, context and text 

Carrying over from the previous modules, we come down to details of the way we can describe our transactions with the world, context by context. We are not all members of the same social networks; we become exponents of different forms of discourse – you need a lawyer in court; an architect must defer to an engineer; sports, dance, music all have specific ways of meaning expressed in ways of saying… We divide up contexts into parameters or variables which help us keep track of what is going on. We build in the direction of things by following the choices that speakers make in that field, with a particular emotional tenor, and we examine the way the channel of communication determines aspects of what people can and cannot do in that mode. The tool is simple and allows us to decide how much we need for our social research questions.

8

Accent, register, dialect, code

A different style of discourse for a different context is called register variation. In the previous lecture, we looked at how to bring out this kind of variation in our research applying field, tenor, and mode. But how does register relate to the more obvious manifestations of a spoken language: namely, the accent someone exhibits, and the differences of dialect (words and grammar that separate the speakers whom we describe as ‘speaking’ the same language? We set out the important distinctions in relation to the 3 terms: accent, register; dialect. We then move back to the different semantic expectations we have in the living of life – how authority is expressed; how it might be contested; how it leads us to make assumptions about something which is still ‘a work in progress’ – namely, what makes sense; how the world is to be ordered and regulated by a silent code.

9

A world of languages

100 years before Darwin proposed evolutionary “descent with modification”, linguists noted that languages appeared to change according to a system of family relationships. Today, the languages of the world present us with a mesmerising spectrum of practical ways of interrelating aspects of our social and material worlds. Languages sort out things, events, times, forms of evidence, human hierarchies, intimacies, predictions; agency; prominence of information…and so much more, into categories that we call grammar. To discover this breadth of variation between humans is much like finding a new continent with abundance of life forms not previously imagined. This raises many issues for us to ponder – the loss of ‘species’ of language as languages disappear; translation as an art; the experience of being bi-lingual; cross cultural thinking; and teaching! 

10

MODULE 4: Language, culture and education

Language and schooling: how culture shapes learning

What actually happens in a classroom? Is primary school an extension of home knowledge? What differences are there in the talk of teachers as we go up to high school and university? How are we different from peoples who did not learn to write and read? Are we stilling evolving through the cultural and mental tools we devise? Will computers change the way we think, feel, and work. Should language be more of a focus of schooling, or can we become good ‘users’ without explicit, objective enquiry into language? Given controls over press and other sources of information, do we need to emphasise the tools of reasoning in language in order to increase our critical powers?

11

Language and culture: language construing reality 

How different are cultures – what are the extremes in viewing the world? How might languages give us clear evidence of different patterns of living? Linguists have been at the forefront of these questions about cultural relativism. We need to look at concrete cases of variation in dealing with the world through meaning – what is unacceptable, even heinous, in one culture can seem reasonable in another, or in the same culture in a different historical era (consider slavery, or capital punishment; but also attitudes to animals, forests, and the passing of time). How do such contrasts of custom come about? And how are we to discuss such clashes of interpretation when they ensnare communities or whole countries into conflicts?

12

The language brain? 

How language came about and its role in the evolution of the human brain IS the hottest topic in human sciences! Linguists are only a minor group in the choir of academic voices who lay claim to this topic: the language brain. Neuroscientists, biologists, philosophers have competed to interpret the most complex unit of matter in the cosmos. For a start the brain is not the beginning and end of our nervous system: language reminds us of our whole body and the links to those around us – we are part of a collective, and come to our personalities through dealing with other people – all the specific connections that we tried to represent in the lectures on social networks.

We review the implications of the most recent neuroscience in relation to the role of language: that is, language as an extension of evolution(do other species have languages, or sign systems?); and language in the construction of our inner lives. Ultimately, we look at the way language constructs that most subtle of all organs – the unique self.    

13

Unit review and exam preparation