Catalogo dei Corsi di studio

Upon completion of the course the students are supposed to acquire a set of base level skills in the following subfields of Linguistics: semiotics of language, articulatory and acoustic phonetics, phonology, morphology, history of writing systems. The student will be guided to the understanding of the main phenomena and categories that characterize human language: the double articulation, phonemes and morphemes, their allophonic and allomorphic variation, the articulatory reality behind the phonological patterns, the acoustic reality behind phonetic events. It is expected that the student will be able to apply the abstract linguistic categories to the material coming from both modern and classical European languages, and from ancient and modern Oriental languages. The aim is to make students reflect on the languages ​​of the Near East, Central Asia and the Far East, studied in this degree program, and to be able to evaluate how the general principles of the functioning of human language manifest themselves unfailingly, although with great variability, in very different languages. The course also aims to refine the student's critical skills through the comparative analysis of different phonological and morphological systems, and, on the other hand, through the comparison of different scientific approaches to the problems of language. At the end of the course it is assumed that the student acquires the ability to perform basic tasks of linguistic analysis: phonetic transcription of words of his own mother-tongue, morphological analysis and glossing of words and sentences, ability to distinguish between graphic reality and linguistic reality. These skills will be verified through written exercises and oral presentations during the final exam. The course also aims to allow the student to access the reading of specialist texts related to the linguistic fields analyzed during the course.

Programme

The course includes the study of the following topics, all related to the basics of modern linguistics:
- definition of the basic concepts of linguistics and semiotics;
- description of the articulatory apparatus, the production and articulatory classification of the linguistic sounds;
- description of the physico-acoustic characteristics of sound in general, and, in particular, of the acoustic and spectrographic characteristics of the linguistic sounds;
- definition of the main concepts of phonology, as well as the history of phonological debate from the foundation to the binarist approach;
- definition of the main concepts of morphology, as well as an introduction to the linguistic typology;
- discussion of the problems inherent in the relationship between language and writing.

Adopted texts

Claudia A. Ciancaglini & Artemij Keidan, "Linguistica generale e storica per studenti di lingue orientali e classiche". Milano, Firenze: Le Monnier, Mondadori, 2018. Volume I.

Bibliography

- Ferdinand de Saussure, "Cours de linguistique générale", Lausanne & Paris: Payot, 1916 (Eng. transl.: "Course in General Linguistics", transl. by Roy Harris, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1983). - Nikolaj Trubeckoj, "Grundzüge der Phonologie", Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958 (Eng. transl.: "Principles of phonology", transl. by Ch. A. M. Baltaxe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). - Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant & Morris Halle, "Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates", Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1951.

Prerequisites

The main requirement for this course is a good knowledge of the grammatical description of one's own mother-tongue, in the form in which it is taught in secondary schools. The possession of the main numeracy skills is also desirable.

Frequency modes

Attendance, although optional, is strongly recommended.

Exam modes

The exam consists in answering questions that deal with all the main topics covered during the course: definition of the main concepts of linguistic theory, articulatory phonetics (including a phonetic transcription exercise), acoustic phonetics, phonology (including the history of the discipline) and morphology. Some of the exam sessions, due to logistic reasons, could be performed as a written test consisting in answering an open-ended questionnaire, to be completed in 90 minutes.

Exam reservation date start	Exam reservation date end	Exam date
16/12/2020	21/01/2021	25/01/2021
25/01/2021	03/02/2021	05/02/2021
05/02/2021	16/02/2021	19/02/2021
21/03/2021	12/04/2021	14/04/2021
06/05/2021	07/06/2021	11/06/2021
11/06/2021	25/06/2021	28/06/2021
28/06/2021	09/07/2021	12/07/2021
12/07/2021	07/09/2021	10/09/2021
10/09/2021	23/09/2021	25/09/2021
06/10/2021	13/11/2021	17/11/2021
18/12/2021	20/01/2022	24/01/2022