Linguistics: Linguistic description: Above the sentence - weekly task sheets
Author: Szilvia Papp
© Szilvia Papp
Summary
At the University of Portsmouth, first year modern languages students have a course in Linguistic Description. The materials here are a complementary set to those we use in phonetics/phonology/prosody, morphology, semantics and syntax, and cover above the sentence phenomena, such as text, discourse and conversation analysis, as well as stylistics and pragmatics. The lectures are built on the analysis of English and in the tutorials students carry out comparative analyses of other languages. The assessment for the unit consists of a portfolio of weekly tasks. Students are required to find out about a language of their choice from a native speaker informant. Students have traditionally investigated their chosen language of study (French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian), but some students have done their projects on more exotic languages such as Thai, Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Finnish, Swedish, Malay, Korean or Greek. We have found that the project encourages initiative, a strong sense of involvement, an attitude of enquiry, and a scholarly approach to linguistic analysis in the students. It prepares them for independent and systematic study of languages in the knowledge of the principles of organisation and use underlying them.Format:
text files (Word)
Access to materials
Contents:
- PortfolioTemplate
Download Linguistic Description Portfolio: Instructions to Students (23.5kb) - Project01: Semantics - Componential Analysis
Download Project 01 (31kb) - Project02: Semantics - Collocations with Colours
Download Project 02 (31kb) - Project03: Idioms & Proverbs
Download Project 03 (31kb) - Project04: Semantics - Metaphors
Download Project 04 (31kb) - Project05: Stylistics
Download Project 05 (31kb) - Project06: Conversation Analysis
Download Project 06 (31kb) - Project07: Pragmatics - Person & social deixis
Download Project 07 (31kb) - Project08: Pragmatics - Presuppostion triggers & indirect speech acts
Download Project 08 (31kb) - Project09: Pragmatics - Discourse & speech acts
Download Project 09 (31kb) - Project10: Pragmatics - Speech acts & politeness
Download Project 10 (31kb)
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