Introduction to Linguistics

This course is an introduction to the field of linguistics—the science of human language. When we study linguistics, we study both individual languages and the phenomenon of human language as a whole. Linguists aim for a general theory that tells us how languages work. We will focus on such questions as: I What does it mean to know a language? I How can we, as linguists, be explicit about what a speaker knows implicitly? I How and why do languages around the world differ from/resemble each other?