Spring 2024 Linguistics Electives Without Pre-Requisites

Looking for an interesting elective to take this summer? The following courses are open to all students and do not require any pre-requisites. Most of these courses also fulfill your Breadth-Social Sciences (B-Soc) or Breadth-Science (B-Sci) requirements. 

NOTE: If you are a Linguistics major student, you cannot count these courses as part of your B-Soc/Sci requirements.  

Explores the foundations of human language from a variety of perspectives. Young children acquire language effortlessly. How is this possible, and why is it so much more challenging to learn a new language later in life? How does the human brain use complex grammatical systems to communicate? Students will learn new ways to think critically about language and communication. Open to all students. Breadth-Social Sciences.

Introduces students to theories about words and vocabulary. Explores topics such as the roots of the English vocabulary, how we create new words and how we learn them. Also discusses practical applications such as constructed languages for use in science fiction, and word recognition in artificial intelligence. Open to all students. Students with credit for LING 110 may not take this course for further credit. Breadth-Social Sciences.

Examines the relationship between language use and social structure. Considers how social factors such as gender, class, age, and ethnicity may be reflected in language use, as well as "big picture" topics that include multilingualism, dialect variation, language policy and linguistic stereotypes. Encourages students to think critically about the social dimensions of language. Open to all students. Breadth-Social Sciences.

Introduces the scientific study of speech, focusing on the mechanisms of speech production and perception, the ways in which speech is described and analyzed, the relationship between speech and technology, and the practical applications of phonetic science. Open to all students. Breadth-Social Sci/Science.

Provides a practical overview of English grammar based on linguistic principles. Explores fundamentals of English sentence structure, grammatical categories and grammatical analysis through lectures and hands-on work in the classroom. Develops skills that are applicable in language analysis, writing and communication. Open to all students.

Explores how language works. Introduces students to the systematic nature of language by exploring the patterns of sounds, words, sentences and meanings in English and other languages. Develops problem-solving and critical thinking skills through hands-on training in pattern recognition and language data analysis. Open to all students. Breadth-Social Sciences.

Develops skills in language analysis by focusing on reading and writing of linguistic argumentation. Explores the foundations of such argumentation in the core areas of linguistics. Students read and discuss primary literature in linguistics in order to understand how to formulate hypotheses and evaluate them. They also learn how to use writing to construct their own solutions to challenging linguistic problems. Prerequisite: LING 220. Writing/Quantitative.

A systematic approach to the study of linguistic variation in different areal, social, and cultural settings. Prerequisite: LING 282W. Recommended: LING 160. Writing.

Explores how language works in human cognition. Investigates how people produce and understand language (whether written, spoken or signed). Uses evidence from the production and comprehension of speech sounds, words, and sentences to introduce psychological and cognitive systems for human language. Prerequisite: LING 220.

Introduces theories of sentence structure. Prerequisite: LING 282W

Basic formal aspects of meaning (e.g. compositional semantics, truth conditional semantics and quantification in natural language) and how they are distinguished from pragmatic aspects of meaning. Prerequisite: LING 282W. Quantitative.

A survey of methods of speech sound description and transcription. Prerequisite: LING 282W.

Theoretical and practical aspects of second language learning. Prerequisite: LING 282W.

Implementation of linguistic principles in the teaching of English as a second language, including classroom teaching practice with adult learners of English. This course is graded on a pass/fail basis. Prerequisite: LING 360362.

Explores language as a system of the human brain, including specific topics such as the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of language; language production, perception and processing; bilingualism, language learning and brain plasticity; and aphasia, dyslexia, deafness and sign languages. Prerequisite: 12 units of upper division linguistic courses.

Introduction to theoretical and applied issues in the computational processing of natural language. Prerequisite: LING 250 or SDA 250.