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The second part of the introductory module in English linguistics is chiefly concerned with the description and analysis of linguistic meaning: How do words actually ‘mean’ something? How are words organised in the mental lexicon? Why do sentences often convey so much more meaning to us than what is expressed by the words they contain? Why can linguistic forms often have multiple meanings, and how can we distinguish between these meanings? How can the individual elements of a sentence be arranged in order to communicate our message effectively, i.e. in order to emphasise the right things, present things as given or new, and background things that we presuppose? How do form-meaning pairings vary in a linguistic community, i.e. according to regional, social and functional factors? In order to answer these (and other) fundamental questions about language, the course will introduce basic notions of four important branches of linguistics, viz. semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. It will be rounded off by an introduction to doing actual linguistic research, by looking at some important aspects of how linguistic research questions are typically asked and answered in a scientifically appropriate way.
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