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The first section of this course introduces the study of articulation (articulatory phonetics), including the details of the vocal apparatus and how it is used to produce speech. The course introduces the International Phonetic Alphabet and teaches how its symbols can be used to provide an accurate representation of the sounds of language. It also considers how speech analysis software helps in the understanding of speech. In the second section of the course, we study how languages differ in their selections of speech sounds from among the full range of possibilities in the world. We also discover how syllables are organised, and how stress and tone may be used in languages.
The first section of this course introduces the study of morphemes, the smallest parts of words that contribute to meaning. Students learn how words are formed through processes such as inflection, compounding and reduplication. The second section of the course considers the rules of syntax: rules by which words are combined into phrases, forming the hierarchical structures which produce sentences. Students learn to apply tests such as replacement and movement, and to recognize the application of syntactic processes such as passivization and question formation.
This course will deepen students’ understanding of English as a global language and its role in cross- cultural communication. It is intended to enhance understanding of the unique characteristics of Jamaican English and other Caribbean Englishes, while also developing students’ English language competencies and ability to communicate across different Englishes. The course includes hands-on practice in the analysis of English, as used by Jamaican speakers and by speakers in other regions of the world.
This introductory course will have students examine questions such as “what is language?”, “what is human communication?” and “how is language used in society?” A glimpse into sentence structure will give a new perspective on ideas learnt in school about grammar. A study of the relationships between language and society will open students’ eyes to variation in language. Consideration of the utterances of infants will reveal how knowledge and use of language develops in children. The identification of areas of the brain controlling various functions of speech will provide an explanation of some of the ways in which individuals can suffer language deficiencies.
This course provides an introduction to the study of language structure, and will help students see that variation in language is limited, despite differences between languages. It considers how the vocal apparatus is used to produce speech sounds and how individual languages use sounds to differentiate words. Students also learn how words can be analyzed to consist of smaller meaningful parts called morphemes, how these can be classified by their function in language, and how words are formed through processes such as inflection, compounding, reduplication. Finally, the course considers how words are combined to form hierarchically structured phrases and sentences.
LING1402 compresses some of the subject matter of LING1001 and LING1002 in a single course. For a fuller understanding, it is recommended that those two courses are taken instead. LING1402 should NOT be taken alongside either LING1001 or LING1002.
This course is designed for the teacher of language in the Caribbean. The basics of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics will be covered. The course also introduces students to issues concerned with language variation, criteria for describing language situations, attitudes towards languages and the function of particular languages in a speech community. Teachers will be given the basic tools to provide preliminary formal and functional analyses of the speech communities from which their students come, introducing the teacher to issues which they will be invited to consider as they make pedagogical choices in literacy and language teaching.
Haitian is one of the major Creole languages in the Caribbean. It is spoken by more than nine million persons and is among the few Creole varieties that have gained official status. In this course, students will have an opportunity to acquire a basic facility with oral and written expression and comprehension in Haitian. They will also be exposed to a range of French-lexicon Creole texts, both written and oral, and the lyrics of popular Kweyòl music. A deliberate effort will be made to provide students with exposure to the major dialects of Haitian. This course has replaced LING2801 Structure and Usage of French Lexicon Creole I.
The languages of Deaf communities represent important linguistic minorities in the Caribbean. This course aims to expose students to communication in Jamaican Sign Language, a language which makes use of a visual-gestural mode. Students will acquire basic conversation skills, and beginners’ level insights in the structure of the language. Jamaican Sign Language is largely mutually intelligible with other Sign Languages of the Anglo-Caribbean region. This course has replaced LING2819 Structure and Usage of Caribbean Sign Language I.
This course, building on basic concepts introduced in LING1001 or LING1402, focuses in more detail both on articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and on the theories which seek to account for the phonological systems of human language. Using a Generative theoretical approach, it examines how we can understand phonological rules, the structure of syllables, and phenomena such as stress, tone and intonation in languages. It also equips students with the tools to analyse dialectal characteristics of English as spoken in different regions of the world.
This course, building on basic concepts introduced in LING 1002 or LING1402, examines the principles which underlie syntactic structure, and develops a model which explains structural relations and syntactic processes. It explores constituency, X-bar theory, Binding, Case theory and Theta theory, to develop an understanding of the general principles applicable to any language in the analysis of its structure.
This course provides an introduction to the study of meaning in natural languages. It examines basic concepts such as sense and reference, meaning relations including polysemy and hyponymy, the relationship between meaning and structure and semantics versus pragmatics.
This course explores approaches to the learning and teaching of second and foreign languages across the world, with special emphasis on the sociolinguistic context of the Caribbean. It also discusses developments in Applied Linguistics and their applicability to language teaching and testing in the Caribbean context.
This course introduces the general processes of first and second language acquisition. It then turns to the acquisition of a first language by children born into Creole-speaking communities and its relation to the acquisition of English as a second language in such an environment. This provides a basis for discussions of the real-world implications for the acquisition of English by children in the pre-Primary and Primary language arts classrooms and for the teaching of English in this context.
Many persons assume that the social norms of the Deaf are the same as those of the hearing. As this is not so, students need to be aware of and be able to appreciate the cultural differences that exist. This course explores the cultural experiences and perspectives among persons who are Deaf. In addition, the course provides an overview of issues related to members of the Deaf community.
This course covers the full range of types of language situations, including bilingual, multilingual, diglossic and Creole continuum. It looks at the range of functions that particular languages can perform in a speech community, for example, official, standard, private, public, etc. and examines, as well, how language attitudes are formed. The entire course is supported by references to case studies from language situations around the world.
The course is fundamentally an exploration of the ways language can be studied as a social phenomenon, and focuses on developing an objective understanding of the links which speakers make between language and social groupings. The course will examine the connection between specific language features in speech communities such as the pronunciation of ‘r’ and the social background of the speaker who uses the feature. Other topics include sociological and social psychological explanations for language use, language change, language and gender, and language ideology. This course has a strong Caribbean focus.
This course reviews basic grammatical concepts and terminology in order to develop an understanding of the structure of English. The course will cover thematic variants of the kernel clause as well as clause/sentence type, among others. It investigates concepts of standardness and correctness and aims to give students a solid understanding of English sentence structure.
The course focuses on the relationship between language and sex as a biological category versus gender as a social phenomenon. It investigates the application to Caribbean language use of some of the theoretical frameworks through which this relationship has been studied. Also discussed are the ways children acquire gendered language identities and issues relating to sexism in language. Actual conversations are recorded and transcribed for analysis. This course has a strong Caribbean focus.
This course will examine how the Creole and standard languages spoken in Caribbean, as well as the language varieties intermediate between them, are used in commercially produced popular music lyrics across the decades from the 1950s into the 21st century. It will focus on mapping the patterns of language choice on to a series of other features, i.e. the musical genres, the topics, the guises the performers adopt, and the particular time period. The course will explore the ways in which music and the associated technologies provide Caribbean Creoles with the means to become international languages. The course also trains students to answer questions by way of actual research of samples of the music lyrics.
This course investigates the language geography of the Caribbean in terms of speech forms and accents and asks what makes persons from each territory sound different when speaking the same language. It looks at speech production, inclusive of elocution and accent production, and at the application of this knowledge to certain situations, such as making oneself understood around the region, providing consultation to movie production companies, and the like.
This course follows on LING2801 or LING1801 and continues the study of French-lexicon Creole through written texts and through exposure to the spoken language, aiming also to develop increased fluency in the use of the language by the students.
This is another in a series of courses offering students exposure to a living Caribbean language. This is an introduction to one of the few Arawakan languages still spoken in the Caribbean, Garifuna as spoken by the Garinagu or 'Black Caribs' of Belize. It will give students the ability to engage in conversational use of the language while exposing them to the structure of the language, including its similarities to other Arawakan languages. This will take place in a context where the student learns to appreciate the sociocultural norms associated with an indigenous Caribbean language.
This course gives insight into the history, linguistic structure and usage of Jamaican Creole, helping students to see it as a language in its own right. Orthography, literature and lexicon are some of the areas that will be covered. The course will also consider the strategies that need to be employed to take Jamaican Creole outside of its traditional domains of use, developing projects around its use for purposes such as news reading, the presentation of health care information, etc.
The background to any preparation of Jamaican language interpreters for the legal system requires familiarity with the appropriate technical legal terminology in Jamaican Creole. Building on the basis of the insights developed in LING2810, it is this need which this course seeks to fulfill.
This course is aimed at enhancing the receptive and expressive sign language skills of students, including the expression of abstract concepts in the sign language. It will also introduce students to more advanced aspects of the cherology, morphology and syntax, particularly nonmanual behaviours and classifiers of a Caribbean Sign Language.
This course is designed for students in the Faculty of Medical Sciences entering the Clinical Practice phase of their training and is intended to specifically address the management of Deaf patients. LING2821 provides an opportunity to learn signs for the healthcare domain and to obtain fluency by practicing the use of sign language in immersion-type settings.
This course explores the objectives of and reasons for research in the area of computational linguistics. It introduces students to the difficulties and limitations of a computational approach to linguistic problems. It also addresses computational procedures and programming languages, from the perspective of the linguist. The highpoint of the course is the application of computational techniques to a problem in linguistics.
This course presents the fundamental theories of translation as outlined by the various schools of thought on the subject. In seeking to broaden the knowledge base of the student of linguistics and foreign languages, it highlights that translation is far more than simply changing words in one language to words in another language. Students develop an awareness of what is required to
effectively produce a new text which conveys the meanings contained in the original text.
This course combines theory and practice. On the theoretical side, it covers the representation of segments and auto-segments, phonological rule types, the syllable, metrical phonology, and markedness. On the practical side, it includes hands-on experience in the use of speech processing software and shows how the software can be used to develop a deeper understanding of the acoustic properties of speech.
This course continues the study of syntactic structure, progressing seamlessly from work covered in LING2002. The course investigates ways in which properties of human language are explained within a theoretical framework and emphasizes that data are meaningless in the absence of a theory. Using a Transformational Generative model, the course investigates how to account for transformations such as head-to-head movement and phrasal movement, and crucially, the restrictions on movement. This is presented as a fairly complete and simple system, laying the theoretical foundation for further explorations.
This course takes an in-depth look at the sociohistorical background and development of Caribbean languages: indigenous languages of the Caribbean (in particular Arawakan and Cariban languages), the languages which were brought to the region under colonialism (European, African and Asian languages) and the Creole languages which arose in the plantation societies and maroon societies of the region. In addition to a detailed analysis of the historical backdrop to contemporary Caribbean language situations, the course also considers the extent of our knowledge of the grammars of these languages.
This course examines the validity of the term ‘Creole,’ and looks at the world-wide distribution of Creole languages. It aims to familiarize students with the debates on Creole genesis and Creole typology that have dominated the study of these languages and to engage them in a critical evaluation of the positions held by different sides in these debates. It goes on to look at the phenomenon of decreolisation in the context of theories of language change.
This course introduces students to Discourse Analysis with a focus on conflict talk, both around the world and in Jamaican and Caribbean contexts. It explores theoretical approaches to the analysis of spoken discourse such as the inferential, interactional and code approaches, and has students apply them to the analysis of their real-life recordings. A key aspect of the course involves students collecting, transcribing and coding spoken discourse.
This course focuses on the practical aspects of language use in negotiation. It examines the communication processes involved in negotiation and covers both the basic principles and the practice of negotiation. It analyses language use in negotiation through role play and simulation and uses these to examine models and methods of negotiation; persuasive strategies; negotiator characteristics and styles; power and gender issues and social and cultural issues in negotiation.
This course analyses the links between language and national identity, and also deals with the role of language in official communication networks. Against this background, it analyses the various kinds of efforts made to plan language and which consciously affect its use in human society, especially in relation to Caribbean Creole speech communities and the various current developments in language policy in Caribbean societies such as Haiti, Suriname, St. Lucia, Dominica, and Jamaica. Finally, this course aims at giving students practical experience related to Language Planning or the development of the resources of languages for official use. This will be done via small research projects, which students would select in consultation with the course lecturer.
This course introduces the student to basic research methods in linguistics. Equipped with this knowledge, students are required to design their own programme of field research and go into the field, under supervision, to collect language data from informants. They are required to transcribe portions of this data and provide some preliminary analysis.
Building on the Level II courses, this course is designed to help students expand vocabulary and develop language skills and conversational fluency. Specialized vocabularies for areas such as medicine, education and the law are covered. Through this course, students will be immersed in an environment simulated to match that of the sign community. All sessions will be conducted in sign language with very minimal use of voice.
This course examines the field of interpreting and the role of an interpreter. It considers how to define the communication process, and how to consider client(s) and do situational assessments. The interpreter role and ethics, the process of interpreting, settings and assignments are also examined.
The goal of this course is to produce persons who can perform professionally as Sign Language interpreters. Such persons have to be able to work from a source language to a target language. This means that visual memory, the ability to produce equivalent message content, knowledge of vocabulary and register, and ability to make cultural adaptations are essential. A practicum component involving supervised interpreting experience in different contexts (legal, educational, medical) ensures that students meet these criteria.
Although students have been exposed to interpreting in a variety of settings, they need to develop specialised skills for interpreting in legal settings. Students need to be sensitised to issues specific to working in legal fields. This course will prepare students to work in all stages of the judiciary process – from law enforcement officials to court officials.
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