Introduction to Linguistics

This is a general introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of human language. We will focus on the major core subfields of linguistics: morphology, phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics. These subfields are areas of active research in their own right, and are also prerequisite to working in a number of other subfields of linguistics which we will cover near the end of the course, including sociolinguistics and language variation, historical linguistics and language change, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.