B004019 - GENERAL LINGUISTICS

Italian

The general properties of Language; Parts of speech; The grammatical structure of languages: examples from Italian and other European Languages; Phonetics and phonology

1-G. Graffi – S. Scalise, Le lingue e il linguaggio, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2013.
2-G. Graffi, Sintassi, Bologna, il Mulino, 1994 (limited to the chapter)"La sintasi Ingenua"
3- F. Albano Leoni – P. Maturi, Manuale di fonetica, Roma, Carocci, 1998

The course aims at providing the main knowledge and understanding abilities regarding the linguistic studies, both at theoretical and methodological levels. The knowledge objectives regard, more specifically, the acquisition of: specialized terminology; knowledge of the properties of human language; basic knowledge and analytical skills at different levels: phonetic and phonology, morphology and lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics.
Among the course objectives, there are also the acquisition of the abilities to communicate in a clear way the acquired knowledge, also in specialistic contexts, to develop the learning abilities needed for solve linguistic issues, and to take up more advanced studies in the field.
The extra-disciplinary goal of the course is to stimulate students to develop: (a) an informed use of the academic environment, of the CdS, of the assistance facilities for managing the student careers; (b) a conscious participation and an effective student-teacher collaboration; (c) an aware use of the learning resources provided by both CdS and Scuola.

Knowledge of grammatical concepts derived fron secondary school

Frontal lessons with the use of power point;
corpus search

Students will be allowed to download the power point presentations at the end of each part of the course and they will be invited to search over italian corpora on line
The course is divided in three parts: a)Language and languages; b)Syntax; c) phonetics and phonology

The exame will be in oral form only, also for students who did not followed the course and for Erasmis e exchange students.
The exame will consists of three questions an the following parts of the course:
1) Language and languages (with a possible choice of the argument by the student)
2) syntax, comprising the syntactic analysis of one sentence
3) phonetics and phonology
It is necessary that the student demonstrates a sufficient level in all parts. The final evaluation will consit in the meed of the scores obteinined in the three parts.

The exame aims at verifing
- Knowledge of the general roperties of uman language
- knowledge and ability to apply the basic concepts of syntax
- knowledge of the main articulatory and acoustic propertis, as well phonologic, properties with special attention to Italian

First part "Language and languages": the schema of communication / types of communication systems in animals / general properties of human languages / the concept of sign in Saussure / Meaning and denotation / compositionality and complex linguistic entities: predication and propositional entities
Second Part "The Grammar" Parts of speech: Lemmata, forms and tokens /open and closed part lexicon / the tagset / The structure of grammatical relations / phrase structure / Valency / thematic roles / types of sentences / the linguistic rules and the notion of competence Third Part " phonetics and phonology": the acoustic description of sound / articulatory phonetics / the notion of phoneme and phonological systems / segmental and supra-segmental information