2009/2010

2009/2010

DM270

L-LIN/01 (GLOTTOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS)

DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES

MODERN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

LINGUE PER L'IMPRESA

1°

1st semester (01/10/2009 - 13/01/2010)

6

30 lesson hours

Italian

 

ROMA ELISA - 6 ECTS

Students are expected to know traditional grammatical notions about word classes, grammatical relations and clause types. They are also expected to have good competence in Italian.

(For both course a and b)
The course provides a basic introduction to the scientific study of languages, explaining some tools for the description of phonological, morphological and syntatic systems of natural languages and for their typological classification.

Introduction to the study of language
The first part of the course will deal with basic notions in semiotics. Then phrasal constituency will be introduced, and such concepts as phrases, heads, syntactic functions, argument structure and semantic roles will be dealt with.
Semantics will be the topic in the second part of the course, and notions such as lexeme, semantic features, prototypes, pragmatics, anaphora, deixis will be introduced.
The third part of the course will give a general introduction to the traditional morphological typology and to the Greenbergian word order universals.

Lectures

*Lecture notes
*Berruto, Gaetano, Corso elementare di linguistica generale, Torino, UTET 1997 : chapters 1 Generalità, 2 Le proprietà della lingua (pp. 1-27), 5 Sintassi, 6 Semantica, 7 Cenni di tipologia linguistica (pp. 65-125).
*Graffi, Giorgio e Scalise, Sergio. Le lingue e il linguaggio, Bologna, Il Mulino 2002: chapters. 2 Che cos’è una lingua? §§ 5-10 (pp. 40-49), 3 Le lingue del mondo (pp. 51-69), 7 La combinazione delle parole: sintassi (pp. 159-186), 8 Il significato e l’uso delle parole e delle frasi: semantica e pragmatica (pp. 189-207).
*Greenberg, Joseph H., Some Universals of Grammar with particular reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements, in J. H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language. Cambridge Mass, M.I.T. Press: 1966 73-113.

The examination will be both written and oral, and will combine part a (Prof. Manzelli) and part b (Prof. Roma). For part b, the written examination will ask students to solve morphosyntactic tests on unknown languages, to label and /or analyse some syntactic structures, and to plot a phrase structure tree of a given Italian sentence. The oral examination consists in the discussion of the written test and of some topics in theoretical linguistics.