teaching

LING 2000

Introduction to Linguistics

The Ohio State University. Autumn 2017, Spring 2018.

Course description

The human capacity for language is one of our most astonishing traits. It allows us to express ideas of (in principle) infinite variety and complexity, it has no known parallel elsewhere in the animal kingdom, it exhibits extraordinary diversity across human communities, and yet nearly all human infants acquire it within the first few years of life. The study of natural language has contributed to the fields of psychology, anthropology, history, computer science, formal language theory, information theory, philosophy, and sociology. Linguistics has major applications in natural language processing (e.g. Siri, machine translation, medical information retrieval, etc.), speech/language pathology and audiology, law, advertising, cryptography and cybersecurity, and education and public policy. Globalization has intensified the need for language skills as a prerequisite to success in many career fields. At the same time, a rapidly growing proportion of the world’s languages are in danger of dying out, making it increasingly urgent to document the linguistic diversity of our species. In other words, there has never been a better time to study linguistics!

LING 2000 (Introduction to Linguistics) is an introductory course in linguistics for both linguistics majors and non-majors with an interest in language. In this course, we will explore the structure of human languages, acquire tools to analyze their properties, and become familiar with some of the questions driving modern linguistic research.