Links

The individual lectures

Lecture: Introduction to Language and Linguistics 

Important note to begin with

The contents of this page is my own intellectual property, apart from the PDFs for Further Reading. Students and interested parties are welcome to explore it but need to be aware that they can be used but need to be acknowledged being my work.

Introduction

This page contains the material that were covered in the individual sessions of the lecture “Introduction to Linguistics”, which I taught for many years at the English Department of the University of Bern.

It represents a fairly informal series of presentations that are meant to give novices, perhaps even reluctant ones, a way to start thinking about language, how it is structured and how it can be analysed. It is accompanied by a script called Beginning Linguistics, which was a work in progress. Any typos or inconsistencies were meant to be addressed in future versions. Perhaps one day I will get it into a final form…

Two words of warning:

• Firstly, the majority of the lectures deal with what is known as Theoretical Linguistics, covering basic topics that later lectures and seminars would not as we were very much a department focused on sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.
• Secondly, as every topic had to be dealt with in the framework of a lecture with 14 sessions, it was not possible to deal with the topics in the detailed fashion that specialists in such topics would consider appropriate. This is particularly true for the Syntax, which is a field complex enough to merit a whole study programme in itself. The model chosen is a simple if not a simplistic one, but teaching an introductory course always means restricting the material to dimensions that can be worked through for beginners in the limited time and with the incipient understanding of a the topic in question.

In the last column there are links to PDFs with excerpts from other textbooks which cover the same ground as we dealt with in class, often from a different angle. It is useful for be aware of alternative approaches to the topics a lecture covers, which is why such further reading is very important for an understanding of the concepts dealt with in this course.

Dive in and,  most importantly, have fun!  

The Script/Workbook with gaps to train looking for key concepts

The same script with the gaps filled in