The properties of human language

Explore how linguists define grammar as the boundaries of language, contrast descriptive with prescriptive rules, and examine grammatical vs communicative competence and key branches like phonetics, syntax, and sociolinguistics.

Explore the distinction between sounds and letters and learn to transcribe language sounds using the international phonetic alphabet, focusing on articulatory phonetics and key articulators.

Learn to describe sounds across languages beyond English using the IPA, including places of articulation, globalized consonants (ejectives, plosives, clicks), rare uvular, pharyngeal, retroflex consonants, and pitch, length, and stress.

Explain how phones coarticulate and undergo assimilation or dissimilation, insert or delete sounds, nasalize vowels, and reveal voicing changes such as flapping and glottal stops in English.

This lecture explains writing phonological rules to map phonemes to allophones using environments, word boundaries, and natural classes, with features like plus or minus voice for English consonants and vowels.

Explore morphology part two: distinguish independent morphemes as words from bound affixes, identify prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes, and analyze roots and stems with examples.

Explore the definition of syntax in linguistics, key terms like grammatical categories, constituent, phrase, and sentence, and how mental knowledge relates to actual usage.

Explore the X-bar syntax template, learn how every sentence and phrase follows a constituent structure, identify heads, specifiers, complements, and traditional subject-predicate roles through examples.

Explore semantics as a subfield of linguistics with interdisciplinary links to logic, math, and philosophy, and learn core ideas about word meaning, paraphrase, entailment, denotation, connotation, and metaphor.

Explore how meaning is organized in semantics through fuzzy concepts, graded concepts, metaphor, and idiolect, with examples like tall, prototypical birds, and spatial metaphors.

Explore pragmatics and contextual meaning in language by examining concepts like opposition, face, face work, common ground, and implicature, through Grice's influential theory.

Explore pragmatics as the study of meaning in context, covering utterances, propositions, common ground, cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions, and conversational and conventional implicatures.

Gricean pragmatics treats language use as designed for optimal communication. It centers the co-operative principle and four maxims—quality, quantity, relation, and manner—and examines presupposition tests.

Explore how languages group by genetic inheritance, typological traits, and contact. See how language changes occur regularly across phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, with emphasis on English history.

Explore language typology and the place of universals in linguistics by examining core typologies across the world's languages, focusing on morphology, alignment, and word order.

Explore typology as the study of language types and universal grammar, showing how languages are classified by features like vowels, consonants, morphology, alignment, and word order.

Explore typological alignment patterns in languages, including nominative-accusative, ergative absolutive, active-inactive, and direct inverse, by examining s, a, and o, case marking, and transitivity.