Theoretical Linguistics

The course aims at introducing students to General Linguistics, the discipline that studies human language in its extraordinary structural complexity. The course will propose a systematic dissertation of the different levels of the linguistic system (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax), with a particular emphasis on the history of linguistics and on the systematic and structured variability of languages in context. The analysis of linguistic structures will be further developed in the last part of the course, with a particular emphasis on the genealogic, areal and typological classification of world's languages.
By the end of the course, students will have at disposal the instruments of analysis of language on the different levels of the linguistic system, other than a knowledge of the evolution and the language uses in different contexts. In this respect, the course will strengthen those same basic competences vital to the education of professionals capable at operating in different communicative settings.

The topics addressed in this course aim at equipping the students with systematic knowledges on the structures and the social-historical uses of human language. These knowledges provide the necessary competences for an autonomous and informed analysis of the different aspects of human language.
By the end of the course, it is expected for the students to have acquired the following:
1) Describe the theoretical and methodological foundations for the analysis of human language on the different levels of the linguistic system;
2) Apply the theoretical knowledges also to different and typological distant languages;
3) Discuss of actual case-studies of linguistic variation on different levels of the linguistic system by connecting those case-studies to the acquired theoretical notions.