Week 1

What is language? What is grammar?

While often thought of as ‘rules’, grammar is a resource for meaning. I’ll illustrate this point by looking at what verbs do. Verbs are at the centre of the most important grammatical unit, the clause. The verb is a structure that allows us to represent and construe process, flux and change. It’s time to move beyond the ‘verb is a doing word’ definition, to explore the power and beauty of the grammar of verbs.

Week 2 & 3

Constituency: Units in grammar

Language has structure, and this structure is made of different grammatical units, such as the morpheme, groups and phrases, and clauses. To understand how speakers make meaning with language, we have to understand and be able to analyse these basic units in grammar.

Week 4

What is a clause?

To use language in the many and varied ways we interact, we need to put words into structures. The most important grammatical unit is the clause, because it is through the clause we create ‘experiential’, ‘interpersonal’ and ‘textual meanings’. In this lecture, we will build on the two previous weeks by looking at whole clauses, and different types of clauses. We will even see clauses inside (i.e. ‘embedded in’) other clauses.

Weeks 5 & 6

Language construing experience

Humans use language for meaning making of three kinds. This week we begin exploring how grammar allows us to make sense of experience, to turn experience into meaning that we can share with our nearest and dearest, or complete strangers. We will come back to the verbal group, and look at different kinds of verbs/processes, and how we use grammar to construe action, saying and thinking, and relations of identity and similarity.  

Weeks 7 & 8

Language enacting social relationships

Humans don't produce linguistic structure as an end in itself. Whenever we talk, we talk to someone, even when that someone is someone we don't know or can never know. There is always an audience for our talk. There are many dimensions to our social relations. For instance, how do you talk to people who have some kind of power over you? How does your talk reflect a relation of familiarity or intimacy? When you talk to very young kids, or to elderly people, how does your language vary? These kinds of distinctions are reflected and made through linguistic choices. This week we begin looking at the grammar that enables us to enact our social relations.

Weeks 9 & 10

Language for creating coherent text

Language allows us to make meanings of two kinds simultaneously: meanings about the world, and meanings about the social relations that pertain to a given situation. How do we make all this hang together? The textual function is the grammar for creating coherent texts. This week we look into the options in grammar for the order of elements in a clause, and how this order has consequences for text structure and coherence.

Week 11

Building up text

Sometimes our interactions are very short. Often they are not. Humans in all kinds of situations create extended texts. They do this by joining clauses together into long stretches of clauses. In this lecture, we look at the grammatical systems which underpin our ways of joining clauses together. 

Week 12

Language in society, society in language 

We analyse real data in linguistics to help us understand the nature of language. But we also apply our insights to understanding all kinds of language-related issues, including language in literature, politics, and healthcare communication. In this lecture I examine some of the many applications of the tools you have studied in this unit.