Skip to Main Content

TRA2130 Language Studies for Translation: Home

Course Description

This course introduces students to the systematic study of the phonetics and phonology of the English language. We will learn about the human speech apparatus in detail, and the mechanisms that are involved in speech sound production. The focus is on the sound inventory and the basic phonological patterning of English. We will learn how English sounds are made, and develop a set of rules by which sounds are combined into syllables and syllables into even larger units, such as feet. We will learn some of the common sound changes of English and ways to analyze such changes. The course teaches basic conceptual tools that will allow students to analyze the sound system of English, and indeed the sound system of any language. Although the course emphasizes standard English, we will also examine the sounds of other varieties of English, including Hong Kong English and Singapore English.

Recommended Books

Tense

This book introduces the range of variation found in tense systems across the languages of the world. In Chapter One, preliminary remarks are given concerning the notion of tense and its relation to time, in particular defining tense as the grammaticalization of location in time. Chapters Two, Three, and Four discuss the three major parameters that are relevant in the definition of tense categories revolving the deictic center. Chapter Five investigates the interaction of tense with syntactic properties of various languages. Chapter Six reaches the conclusion towards a formal theory of tense.

Aspect

This book introduces verbal aspect and related concepts, and presents aspect as a part of general linguistic theory. Chapters One, Two, and Three introduce the major concepts utilized in the study of aspect. Chapter Four investigates the interaction of aspect and tense in various languages, and also aspect and voice. Chapter Five discusses formal means of expressing aspect. Chapter Six discusses the concept of markedness as applied to aspectual oppositions. Examples are particularly drawn from English and the Slavonic and Romance languages, but also from Arabic, Chinese, Welsh, Greek and a variety of others.

Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage

This book is about the principles for constructing polite speech. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languages and cultures. A motive for these parallels is isolated and a universal model is constructed outlining the abstract principles underlying polite usages. This is based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures: the Tamil of South India, the Tzeltal spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, and the English of the USA and England.

Definiteness

This book investigates definiteness both from a comparative and a theoretical point of view, showing how languages express definiteness and what definiteness is. It surveys both the cross-linguistic area- a large number of languages to discover the range of variation in relation to definiteness and related grammatical phenomena, such as demonstratives, possessives and personal pronouns, and the theoretical area- an outline of the theoretical literature on the nature of definiteness in semantics, pragmatics and syntax, and develops an account on which definiteness is a grammatical category represented in syntax as a functional head.

Copulas: Universals in the Categorization of the Lexicon

This book presents an analysis of grammatical descriptions on copulas of over 160 languages drawn from the language families of the world. It takes issue with both accepted definition and description. The book shows that some languages have a single copula, others several, and some none at all. In a series of statistical analyses, it seeks to explain why linking the distribution of copulas to variations in lexical categorization and syntactic structure. It concludes by advancing a comprehensive theory of copularization which it relates to language classification and to theories of language change, notably grammaticalization.

Cognitive Grammar

The book introduces the theory of Cognitive Grammar, placing it in the context of current theoretical debates about the nature of linguistic knowledge, and relating it to more general trends in 'cognitive' linguistics. Part One introduces Cognitive Grammar against a discussion of general theoretical issues. Part Two introduces some basic concepts of Cognitive Grammar. Part Three focuses on the internal structure of words. Part Four discusses nouns, verbs, and clauses. Part Five addresses some further topics in the study of meaning. Part Six focuses on the study of metaphorical expressions. Part Seven addresses the interrelated topics of idioms and constructions.

Regularity in Semantic Change

This book examines, from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis, how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, the book shows that there are predictable paths for semantic change across different conceptual structures and domains of language function, and that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy.

An Introduction to Language

This book serves for students major in both linguistics and teaching English as a second language, foreign language studies, general education, the cognitive and neurosciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. There are 12 chapters in this book, covering the general study of language; the study of grammar with morphology, the notions of constituency, syntactic categories, phrase structure trees, structural ambiguity, the infinite scope of language, and the X-bar grammatical patterns; semantics and pragmatics; phonetics; phonology; sociolinguistic study of language; language change; language acquisition; psychology of language and the neurology of language; fundamentals of computational linguistics, and writing.

Recommended Databases