Fundamentals of language in general and Spanish in particular. Linguistic knowledge, language variation, and language contact phenomena. Representative Spanish sound systems, syllabic structure, sentence patterns, structure and meaning of words. Analysis of data from oral and written registers. Given in Spanish.
Athena Title
Introduction to Spanish Ling
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in SPAN 3050E, LING 3050E
Prerequisite
(SPAN 3010 or SPAN 3010H or SPAN 3011 or SPAN 3011S) and (SPAN 3020 or SPAN 3020H)
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
One objective of this course is to improve students’ oral and listening comprehension skills in Spanish through a series of activities, some of which are instructor-driven, others of which are between the students and their classmates, so that they can effectively express ideas orally.
A second objective of this course is to improve students’ writing skills in Spanish through the use of scaffolded writing assignments of varying lengths and types that force students to further develop their logical reasoning and metalinguistic skills to analyze the Spanish language in writing.
Students review the basics of appropriate methodologies and/or theoretical frameworks for analyzing human language data (e.g. sounds, words, sentences, and utterances) in a selection of linguistic sub-fields.
Students examine Spanish language use (e.g. sounds, words, sentences, and utterances of Spanish) in the real world from the viewpoint of a selection of linguistic sub-fields.
Students make predictions of how Spanish works based on empirical observation of language data, and then critique the quality and validity of their conclusions in light of a variety of theoretical frameworks in different linguistic sub-fields.
Topical Outline
Week I: Introduction to human language as rule-governed
structures, and speech as rule-governed language use.
Week II: Signs and symbols. Knowledge of sound system,
sentences, and the meaning of words; creativity of linguistic
knowledge.
Week III: Linguistic variation; the social dimension of
language; Spanish language and dialects; male and female
speech.
Week IV: Spanish sounds and spelling; syllables and syllable
structure
Week V: Consonants, vowels, glides. Systems of representation.
